AI Today: The AI payoff that has not shown up
Apollo's chief economist says AI has delivered nothing measurable to companies outside Big Tech. The bigger problem may be how few of them are measuring.
On 24 October, Apollo's chief economist, Torsten Slok, opened his daily note to clients with a blunt line. Despite the money and the hype, he wrote, AI has delivered "zero financial payoff" to corporate America outside of tech.
AI Today is a series from Fíor, a natural language classifier that predicts whether a piece of text was more likely written by a person or by AI. Each piece explains one development in AI and shows where the claims come from.
Slok's evidence is a comparison. On one side are the Magnificent Seven: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. On the other is the rest of the S&P 500, which he calls the S&P 493. Revenue per worker and profit margins are rising for the seven and flat for the 493, and he sees no sign yet of AI lifting productivity across the economy. Business Insider put numbers on the gap. Revenue per employee at the big tech firms has risen from about $550,000 in 2022 to nearly $800,000, while the rest of the index has stayed around $550,000.
His conclusion is that mainstream companies are starting to treat spending on AI as a cost that weighs on margins, not a source of growth.
Bought, but not measured
There is another way to read the same gap. In September, Forbes reported on an analysis of S&P 500 earnings. Of those companies, 69% were actively using AI. Only 29% reported a measured result from it, and just 2% tracked an AI-related figure over time.
So some of the payoff may exist and simply go uncounted. That argument has limits, though. Slok is not relying on what companies report about AI. He is looking at revenue and margins, which every company has to count. If AI were paying off at scale outside tech, it should eventually show up there, measured or not.
Bolted on
The more convincing explanation is how AI is being used. Responding to Slok's note on Bluesky, one user said most rollouts they see are "a chat window bolted onto the old process". The steps and approvals stay the same, with one more tool added on top, and that was never going to change a company's margins.
Barclays made a similar point last week, while cutting 5,000 jobs. Its chief executive said years of work on systems and processes had done most of the heavy lifting, and that AI was the icing, not the cake.
Slok's own note ends on a related doubt. AI may be a great calculator, he writes, but business runs on judgment, and judgment depends on context, trust and accountability that a model does not have.
What the note does not show
Slok works for an investment firm, and his daily note is a short take on broad data, not a study of individual companies. A flat average across 493 companies can hide some that are gaining and some that are spending without return. And "zero" is a strong word for a trend that may simply be early.
He ends by saying the AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Magnificent Seven. That is also where the proof will have to come from: ordinary companies measuring ordinary things, before and after, and being honest about what changed.
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