Apollo economist finds zero AI payoff outside tech
Torsten Slok shows flat margins across S&P 493, trillion-dollar compute buildout financed by shareholders yet to see returns
Images
Image Credits:Carol Yepes / Getty Images
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Metallic chain connected by a red knotted rope, representing third party cybersecurity risk
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The chief economist of Apollo Global Management has put a number on what the AI investment boom prefers to leave unmeasured: zero. In a note published this week, Torsten Slok writes that outside the tech industry itself, artificial intelligence has delivered no financial payoff to corporate America at all.
Slok's analysis strips the seven technology giants out of the S&P 500 — he calls the remainder the 'S&P 493' — and finds that profit margins and revenue per worker for those companies are flat. There is, he writes, no evidence that AI is improving productivity at non-tech firms, despite the massive investments and the widespread hype.
The finding lands awkwardly next to the financing now flowing into the sector. Meta has promised hundreds of billions in AI contracts, OpenAI is seeking tens of billions from Gulf investors at a trillion-plus valuation, and analysts attribute a substantial share of US GDP growth to the compute buildout. If Apollo's own economist is right, that capital is buying datacenters whose returns have so far shown up only in the revenue of the chipmakers and cloud providers selling the shovels.
Slok rejects the comfortable explanation that non-tech companies are simply lagging behind. Turning increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue and margins, he argues, will be difficult, because intelligence in business is mostly judgment. 'AI may be a great calculator,' he writes, but it does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules or ethical trade-offs — the things that shape reputational risk and, ultimately, drive revenue.
His note arrives as a private equity firm's own research desk contradicts the productivity narrative underwriting the largest capital expenditure program in corporate history. The investors financing that program cannot fire the executives writing the checks. Slok's margin data suggests that, for now, neither can the technology.