An Apollo economist says AI is providing no financial payoff for most companies.

Meta description: Apollo Global Management economist Torsten Slok says AI has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside tech, with S&P 493 margins flat.

Tags: Apollo Global Management, Torsten Slok, S&P 493, AI productivity, corporate profits

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Before the Apollo note: massive investment, widespread hype

Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok says AI has not benefited the bottom line of any big corporations outside the tech industry. His conclusion comes from a note recently published by Apollo, a private equity giant that used to own TechCrunch.

Slok does not base the claim on company anecdotes. He looks at the S&P 493: the S&P 500, minus Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. In that non-tech slice of corporate America, he says profit margins and revenue per worker look flat, with no evidence that AI is improving productivity.

The starting point is the gap between spending and measurable financial results. AI has arrived with large investment and broad public discussion, yet the note frames the question around what appears in the numbers that listed companies must show.

The S&P 493 test: margins and revenue per worker stay flat

The S&P 493 design removes the largest tech beneficiaries from the sample. If AI were already lifting productivity across corporate America, the effect should be visible outside the companies that build, sell or deploy it at scale. Instead, Slok’s reading is blunt.

“Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech,” Slok said.

That sentence sets up the central question. Is corporate America simply moving more slowly than the tech giants? Slok sounds skeptical. He argues that it will be tough for companies to “turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins.” The issue, in his view, is not only cost or access to models, but the kind of value AI can supply in business decisions.

Why judgment, trust and risk keep the payoff hidden

Slok’s explanation moves from spreadsheets to organizational behavior. “AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment,” he wrote. He later 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.”

This is where the note offers value to readers. A calculator can compress tasks, and cheaper intelligence can make drafts, forecasts and other routine work more available. But revenue and margins depend on decisions that carry accountability: pricing, hiring, customer relationships, brand risk and the informal rules that make a company function. If AI improves only the visible arithmetic of work, while leaving those judgment layers unchanged, flat margins and flat revenue per worker may be the expected outcome.

Current stage: no visible financial payoff outside tech

Recent studies have also found that AI has yet to deliver significant productivity gains. That evidence does not settle whether AI will eventually reshape company economics. It does, however, match Slok’s current-stage conclusion: outside the tech industry, the financial payoff is not showing up in the numbers that investors and boards track. The next signal to watch is whether non-tech companies can convert broad AI adoption into sustained margin or revenue-per-worker movement, rather than merely more tool spending.