Apollo's Torsten Slok says AI has delivered 'zero financial payoff' outside tech

Apollo Global Management's chief economist, Torsten Slok, wrote in an Oct. 24 note that AI "has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech". His evidence is a split inside the S&P 500: "Revenue per worker is rising for the Mag 7 but is flat for the S&P 493," and "Profit margins are rising for the Mag 7 but are flat for the S&P 493."

The Magnificent Seven are AAPL, MSFT, GOOGL, AMZN, META, NVDA and TSLA. Slok's conclusion is that "The AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7," meaning the payoff case for AI spending depends on productivity showing up at ordinary companies, not only at the firms selling the technology.

The note is a set of aggregate charts, so it cannot isolate AI's effect from other drivers of revenue and margins, and adoption can take years to show up in company-level numbers. Still, it lands in a week when Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon report earnings and investors are weighing whether heavy AI capital spending will earn a return.

The measures to watch are the ones Slok used: revenue per employee and margins outside the largest tech companies, and whether management teams outside tech start to cite AI in earnings as a cost or revenue driver.