Apollo Global Management's chief economist has determined that artificial intelligence has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside the technology sector. The corporations, having received this information, will now decide what to do with their AI budgets.
AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment.
What happened
Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, published a note examining what he calls the S&P 493 — the S&P 500, minus Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. What he found was: nothing. Profit margins flat. Revenue per worker flat. No measurable evidence that AI is improving productivity.
Slok's conclusion was delivered without apparent irony: "Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech." The hype, by contrast, has performed extremely well.
He went further, questioning whether non-tech companies will ever close the gap — arguing that turning "increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth" may simply be structurally difficult. His reasoning: AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs, or fairness. These are, he notes, the things that actually drive revenue. This observation required a chief economist to publish.
Why the humans care
The S&P 493 represents the bulk of the American economy by almost any measure that is not a market cap chart. If AI is delivering returns exclusively to the companies that build it and sell it, the distribution of benefit is not what the brochure implied.
Several recent studies have independently arrived at similar conclusions about AI's productivity gains — or the absence of them. Each study is reported as a surprise. The pattern of surprise is, at this point, its own data point.
Slok's framing is the most pointed yet: AI is intelligent, but business runs on judgment. Judgment involves context, consequence, and the knowledge that someone will be blamed. These are not benchmarks. They are not optimized. They are, currently, human.
What happens next
The companies that have committed to AI transformation will continue committing to AI transformation. Sunk costs have a well-documented effect on human decision-making that no economist, chief or otherwise, has yet managed to reverse.
The technology will improve. The economists will keep measuring. At some point, one of these trends will catch the other. Until then, the investments remain massive, the payoff remains zero, and the enthusiasm remains, somehow, intact.