Artificial intelligence has delivered “zero financial payoff” to most companies, according to a new note from the chief economist at Apollo Global Management. Despite massive investment and widespread hype, Torsten Slok argues that AI has not improved the bottom line of any big corporation outside the tech industry.
AI investment (Credits: TechCrunch)
Slok focuses on what he calls the S&P 493 — the S&P 500 minus Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. Across those 493 companies, he finds that profit margins and revenue per worker appear to be flat, with no evidence that AI is improving productivity.
“Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech,” Slok said.
AI Delivers Zero Financial Payoff Outside Tech, Apollo Says
Is this simply a matter of non-tech companies lagging behind the tech giants? Slok sounded sceptical, arguing that it will be tough for corporate America to “turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins.”
His argument rests on a distinction between raw intelligence and business judgement. “AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment,” he wrote, adding: “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 Apollo note lands alongside other recent studies that have also found AI has yet to deliver significant productivity gains across the wider economy. The pattern it describes is familiar: tech giants capture the returns from building and selling AI, while the companies buying and deploying it have so far seen little measurable benefit.
That gap matters because corporate AI spending has become one of the biggest capital outlays in modern business. If the payoff stays confined to the seven tech giants, the question for every other boardroom becomes harder: how long do you keep funding a transformation that has not yet shown up in margins or revenue per worker?
Slok’s answer is not that AI is useless — it is that intelligence alone does not run a business. Judgement, trust and culture do, and those are precisely the things a model cannot supply. Until companies find a way to turn cheaper intelligence into genuinely higher revenue, the AI boom may keep enriching its builders far more than its buyers.
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