Apollo's Slok: AI gives S&P 493 'zero financial payoff'

Torsten Slok's note arrives after years of heavy corporate spending on AI, and it draws a line between the tech giants building the technology and the rest of the S&P 500. By excluding Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla, Slok isolates the companies that are mostly buyers rather than sellers of AI, and finds their profit margins and revenue per worker flat — no evidence of the productivity boost that has been widely anticipated.

Slok's explanation is not that non-tech firms are simply lagging. He argues that turning increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins will be tough, and he frames the limitation in terms of what AI cannot do. In his words, AI may be a great calculator, but in business intelligence is mostly judgment, and 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 adds to a growing body of skeptical findings. Recent studies have also found that AI has yet to deliver significant productivity gains, suggesting the gap between investment and measurable payoff is not confined to one economist's reading of the data.