NAICS 51
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Information & Technology

The technology sector is both the creator of AI and the most deeply transformed by it — from software development to content creation.

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Jump to one of the 8 specialties within Information & Technology.

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Software Publishers

NAICS 5112

The industry that designs, builds, and licenses software — packaged products, SaaS, and AI-native applications. Includes Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, ServiceNow, plus the dominant AI-native vendors (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind) and the entire developer-tools ecosystem.

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Internet Publishing & Broadcasting

NAICS 5163

Social media, video streaming, podcasting, and digital news platforms — Meta, Google/YouTube, TikTok/ByteDance, Netflix, Spotify, X, Reddit. AI shapes recommendation, moderation, advertising, and increasingly the content itself.

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Cloud Infrastructure & Data Processing

NAICS 5182

The cloud and data-center industry — AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, plus the new wave of AI-specialized clouds (CoreWeave, Lambda Labs, Crusoe, Nebius). AI workloads now drive most new infrastructure investment.

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Web Search & Information Services

NAICS 5192

Search engines and information services — Google Search, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, plus AI-native search (Perplexity, You.com, Brave). Generative AI is the biggest disruption search has faced since Google's founding.

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Publishing

NAICS 5111

Newspapers, magazines, books, and academic journals — The New York Times, News Corp, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Elsevier, Wiley. AI is reshaping editorial workflows, monetization, and licensing strategy with the major foundation-model providers.

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Film & Video Production

NAICS 5121

Film studios, TV production, and streaming-service original content — Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix, Sony Pictures, Universal, Paramount. Generative AI is reshaping pre-production, VFX, dubbing, and is at the center of the WGA / SAG-AFTRA contract framework.

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Music Recording

NAICS 5122

Music labels, recording, and publishing — Universal Music Group, Sony Music, Warner Music, plus thousands of indies. Generative-music AI (Suno, Udio) is the most actively litigated AI application in any creative industry.

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Telecommunications Carriers

NAICS 5171

Phone, broadband, and wireless carriers — AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Comcast, Charter, plus international giants and the new satellite layer (SpaceX Starlink, Project Kuiper). AI is applied across network operations, customer service, and increasingly direct-to-cell satellite handover.

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Parent Industry Overview

About Information & Technology

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🏭Industry Overview

Updated May 16, 2026

The information and technology sector is both the primary creator of artificial intelligence and one of the industries most profoundly transformed by it. US tech sector revenue exceeds $2.5 trillion annually, with companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and NVIDIA collectively representing a significant share of global market capitalization. Software, cloud computing, semiconductors, digital media, and telecommunications underpin nearly every other industry's operations.

💡The AI Opportunity

For the technology sector itself, AI is reshaping how software gets built, how systems are operated, and how digital products are designed. AI coding assistants reduce developer time on boilerplate code by an estimated 55% in controlled studies, while enabling developers to tackle more ambitious projects. AIOps platforms monitor complex distributed systems at a scale impossible for human engineers alone. Cybersecurity AI processes billions of events daily to detect threats invisible to human analysis. The technology sector is advancing AI capabilities faster than any governance framework can keep pace — making it both the industry with the greatest AI opportunity and the one with the greatest responsibility.

AI for Good in Information & TechnologySee how AI is making an impact in the Productivity multiplication story.

🤖AI in Action

AI coding assistants (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor) are generating 30–50% of code at major tech companies. AI is automating QA testing, documentation, code review, and deployment. Content platforms use AI for moderation, recommendation, and generation. Search engines are shifting to AI-powered answer engines. Cybersecurity teams use AI for threat detection and incident response. Data centers are being redesigned around AI workloads.

📊Impact on Jobs

Software engineering is being profoundly augmented — not eliminated — by AI. Developers who use AI tools report 2–4x productivity gains. Junior developer roles are evolving: AI handles boilerplate, while humans focus on architecture and novel problem-solving. Roles in AI infrastructure, model evaluation, and responsible AI are among the fastest-growing in the sector. Tech companies are seeing smaller engineering teams build larger products.

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🛠️Top AI Tools in This Industry

AI pair programmer integrated into VS Code, JetBrains, and other IDEs that suggests code completions, entire functions, and documentation as developers type, trained on billions of lines of code.

Enterprise workflow AI platform automating IT service management, HR operations, and business processes with intelligent agents, predictive analytics, and natural language interfaces.

OpenAI logoChatGPTFreemium

OpenAI's flagship AI assistant. Now powered by GPT-5.5 on Plus and above (April 23, 2026 — the new agentic flagship), with GPT-5.5 Pro on Pro/Business/Enterprise. GPT-5.4 mini on Free/Go. The most widely used AI chatbot with 400M+ weekly users. Tiers: Free, Go ($8/mo), Plus ($20/mo), Pro ($200/mo). GPT Image 2, Voice Mode, Deep Research, Custom GPTs.

Anthropic logoClaudeFreemium

Anthropic's AI assistant known for long-context reasoning, coding, and following nuanced instructions. 1M token context window (GA March 2026). Opus 4.6 at $5/$25 per million tokens. Strong safety and helpfulness balance.

Google DeepMind logoGeminiFreemium

Google's AI assistant powered by Gemini 3.1 Pro (Feb 2026) — record benchmark scores on 12+ evaluations. Native multimodal (text, images, audio, video), 1M token context, Deep Think reasoning, and deep integration with Google Workspace.

LangChain logoLangChainFreemium

The dominant open-source framework for building LLM-powered applications and agents. Python/JS libraries plus LangSmith for tracing and LangGraph for complex agents.

📰Information & Technology in the News

View all 11 Information & Technology stories in Top AI Stories

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