Zero is the payoff so far for corporate America outside big tech, according to a new note from Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok, TechCrunch reported.
That is the read for the S&P 493, the S&P 500 minus Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla, where Slok said profit margins and revenue per worker appear flat with no evidence of AI lifting productivity.
Apollo Global Management market, from StartupHub data
Figures below are published StartupHub profiles tagged Apollo Global Management.
Slok put it bluntly in the note. "Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech," he said, per the report.
The comparison is the point. Seven names capture the AI revenue and market value. The other 493 do not show it in margins. On revenue per worker, a classic productivity proxy, the line has not moved.
Business Insider also covered the Apollo note and framed it as an assessment of "Mainstream corporate America," underscoring that the flat trends are not isolated to one sector but to the broad index ex-tech, according to that coverage.
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Slok said the lag may not close quickly. He argued it will be tough for corporate America to turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins, per TechCrunch.
"AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment," he wrote. He 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, per TechCrunch.
What the numbers do not show matters here. The note looks at large public companies and two aggregate series. It does not break out adopters versus non-adopters, it does not capture private companies, and it does not isolate firms that deployed AI deeply in 2024 and 2025 versus those that bought licenses but changed little.
A sustained rise in revenue per worker for the S&P 493, with margins expanding without headcount growth, would change the read. Until then the open question is whether the next two to four quarters convert cheaper inference into pricing power, churn reduction or cost to serve, or whether the gains stay concentrated in the builders of models and chips.
