Big Tech companies have a new obsession: artificial intelligence.

This week, chief executives across the sector packed earnings calls with mentions of the heavily hyped technology, which until recently existed more in the background than as a solid contributor to the bottom line.

In conference calls after financial results, tech execs uttered the phrases ¡°AI,¡± ¡°generative AI,¡± or ¡°machine learning¡± from two to six times as often as they did in the previous quarter, according to a review of conference transcripts.