Apollo economist says AI has delivered no financial payoff outside tech
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Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, said in a note that artificial intelligence has yet to deliver a financial payoff to large U.S. companies outside the tech sector. His analysis of the so-called “S&P 493” — the S&P 500 excluding Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla — found that profit margins and revenue per worker appear flat, with no evidence that AI has improved productivity.
Slok was also skeptical that companies can turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and wider margins. He said that, in business, intelligence depends largely on judgment, accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs and fairness. TechCrunch notes that recent studies have also found no significant productivity gains from AI.
Why it matters · editorial interpretation
Torsten Slok’s analysis suggests caution when assessing AI’s economic return outside technology companies: so far, the cited metrics do not indicate productivity gains among the large U.S. companies examined. It also argues that turning cheaper intelligence into growth depends on organizational factors beyond access to a model.
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