Apollo economist says AI has not boosted profits outside tech giants

Artificial intelligence has not moved the bottom line at most big American companies, according to a note from Torsten Slok, chief economist at private equity giant Apollo Global Management.

Slok’s analysis looks at what he calls the S&P 493: the S&P 500 stock index with seven companies removed — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. Those seven are the companies most associated with building and selling AI infrastructure and services. Stripping them out leaves a proxy for the rest of corporate America, the companies buying and deploying AI rather than selling it.

Across that remaining group, Slok finds profit margins and revenue per worker have stayed flat. He says there is no evidence that AI adoption is lifting productivity at these firms. “Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech,” he wrote in the note.

Why the gap might not close

Slok also pushes back on the idea that non-tech companies are simply behind the tech giants and will catch up as AI matures. He argues it will be difficult for corporate America to “turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins.” His reasoning centers on what AI can and cannot do inside a business. “AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment,” he wrote.

Slok elaborated on that distinction, saying 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.” In his framing, the financial value of a business often comes from judgment calls that sit outside what current AI systems can model, even as the underlying computation gets cheaper and more widely available.

The note lands alongside other recent research pointing in a similar direction. TechCrunch notes that separate studies have also found AI has yet to produce significant productivity gains, adding to a growing body of skepticism about how quickly AI spending translates into measurable business results.

The finding cuts against a core piece of the investment case that has driven AI spending over the past few years: that buying AI tools and services would show up in company financials through fatter margins or more revenue per employee. Slok’s data suggests that, for most of the S&P 500, it has not happened yet.

The note does not say why the payoff has been absent — whether companies are still in an early deployment phase, measuring the wrong metrics, or facing the structural limits Slok describes around judgment and culture. Future earnings reports and any follow-up research from Apollo or other economists on productivity data will show whether the flat trend in profit margins and revenue per worker starts to shift, or whether the gap between tech sellers and other buyers of AI holds steady.