Apollo's chief economist says AI has delivered zero financial payoff outside big tech. Measure each workflow, not the AI budget

If an automation cannot point to a number it moved, it is a cost, not an investment.

What happened

Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, published a note arguing that AI "has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech." He looks at what he calls the S&P 493, the S&P 500 without Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. Revenue per worker and profit margins are rising for the big seven and flat for the rest, and he sees no sign yet of AI lifting productivity growth.

Slok writes that mainstream companies are starting to view token spending as a cost center that weighs on margins, and that they do not need the latest model and are unwilling to pay for it. He also argues that "in business, intelligence is mostly judgment," and that AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture or unwritten rules. TechCrunch, which covered the note, adds that recent studies have also found AI has yet to deliver significant productivity gains.

My take

This is a macro view of the largest US companies, so it does not tell you whether a ten person agency or a clinic will benefit. But the pattern he describes matches what I see when a business buys AI seats and hopes for the best: lots of usage, no measurable change.

The automations that pay for themselves usually share three traits:

1. They replace one specific job with a clear before number. Hours spent on data entry, time to first reply on a lead, invoices chased by hand.
2. They use the cheapest model that does the job well. Most routing, tagging and extraction steps do not need a frontier model, which is Slok's point too.
3. They leave judgment with people. The automation gathers, drafts and flags. A human decides on refunds, pricing and anything that touches a client relationship.

Pick one workflow, write down the number today, build, and check the number again in 30 days. If it did not move, turn it off. That habit is what separates AI spend from AI results.