Apollo Economist: AI Has Delivered Zero Financial Payoff Outside Tech
Apollo's chief economist says profit margins and revenue per worker are flat at S&P 500 companies outside big tech, with no sign AI is lifting productivity.
AI has not improved the bottom line of large corporations outside the technology industry, according to a recent note from Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, the private equity firm that once owned TechCrunch.
"Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech," Slok wrote.
The S&P 493
Slok focuses on what he calls the S&P 493: the S&P 500 minus Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. For that group, he finds that profit margins and revenue per worker appear flat, and he sees no evidence that AI is improving productivity.
One obvious explanation is that non-tech companies are simply slower to adopt the technology than the tech giants. Slok sounded skeptical of that idea. He argues it will be hard for corporate America to "turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins."
Intelligence versus judgment
His reasoning centers on the limits of what AI can do inside a business. "AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment," he wrote. He added that "AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness, all of which shape reputational risk and ultimately drive revenue growth and profit margins."
The note adds to a growing body of research. Recent studies have also found that AI has yet to deliver significant productivity gains.
Why it matters
The assessment comes as companies across industries keep spending heavily on AI tools and infrastructure. If returns do not show up in margins or output per employee, pressure on executives and investors to justify that spending is likely to grow. For now, the clearest financial winners remain the technology firms Slok excluded from his analysis.
