Wall Street is hyping AI. This fund manager is betting instead on fires, HVAC and Berkshire Hathaway.

A Heartland Advisors co-portfolio manager is pushing back against Wall Street's enthusiasm for artificial intelligence, arguing that investors may be better served by looking beyond the companies building AI to those that could benefit from it. His alternative focus: unglamorous, cash-generating businesses tied to fire protection, heating and cooling equipment, and Berkshire Hathaway.

The logic is one of timing and cost. As AI technology becomes cheaper and more widely available, its value may accrue less to the firms selling it than to ordinary industrial companies that adopt it to cut expenses and improve operations. HVAC and fire-safety businesses, for instance, serve steady replacement demand that tends not to depend on the economic cycle in the way cutting-edge technology spending does.

For investors, the takeaway is less about any single stock than about where the returns from a new technology tend to land over time. Watching how quickly AI costs fall — and which traditional industries begin disclosing real efficiency gains — offers a practical way to test whether this contrarian view holds up.