Artificial intelligence has delivered "zero financial payoff" to corporate America outside the technology sector, according to Torsten Slok, partner and chief economist at Apollo Global Management. In a Daily Spark note published on October 24, titled "No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector," Slok argued that despite massive investments and widespread hype, there is still no evidence that revenue growth or profit margins are improving for most large companies.
The note splits the S&P 500 into two groups. On one side are the Magnificent Seven technology giants — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. On the other are the remaining 493 companies, which Slok calls the S&P 493. Revenue per worker is rising for the Magnificent Seven but flat for the S&P 493, he wrote, and profit margins show the same split.
The numbers behind that claim are stark. Reading from Apollo's charts, revenue per employee for the Magnificent Seven has climbed to roughly 780,000 dollars on an inflation-adjusted basis, while revenue per employee for the S&P 493 remains around 525,000 dollars. Profit margins for the Magnificent Seven have risen to close to 30 percent, while margins for the S&P 493 have stayed around 10 percent in recent years.
Productivity tells a similar story. The note plots labour output per hour from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics alongside total factor productivity, the measure maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Neither series shows the sustained step up that would mark a technology-driven productivity boom. "There are still no signs of AI boosting productivity growth," Slok wrote.
Spending data in the note, drawn from Ramp, suggests one reason the payoff is so narrow. The top 10 percent of firms account for 99.5 percent of spending on model serving and inference, and for 95.6 percent of direct spending on OpenAI and Anthropic combined. Among the top 1 percent of AI spenders, 80.4 percent are venture-backed. Slok argued that as long as agentic AI and token spending stay confined to a small part of the economy, the macroeconomic effects of AI will be very limited.
He also said the mood among mainstream buyers is changing. With no impact on the bottom line, he wrote, mainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending not as a source of growth but as a cost centre that weighs on margins. Venture-backed companies, he added, are spending more and more on tokens, while mainstream companies do not need the latest model and are unwilling to pay for it.
Slok framed the open question as whether falling prices will change the picture, as models become commoditised and intelligence gets cheaper. "AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment," he wrote, adding 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.
The note is the latest in a series in which Slok has tracked the gap between AI investment and returns outside technology, following earlier entries on June 30 and August 9. TechCrunch, reporting the note on October 25, noted that recent studies have also found AI has yet to deliver significant productivity gains. Slok's closing line sums up his case: "The AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7."