Apollo's thesis
Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, argues in a note circulated on Saturday, October 24, that artificial intelligence has so far produced no financial return for large American companies outside the technology sector. His phrase, as cited by the source, is “zero financial payoff”: no economic gain despite massive investments and constant media buzz.
To reach this conclusion, Slok divides the S&P 500 into two blocks: on one side Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla; on the other, the remaining 493 companies, which he has dubbed the S&P 493. For the former, revenue per employee and profit margins are rising; for the latter, they remain flat. The note, accompanied by five charts, is published at the opening of the quarterly earnings season.
Not just a delay
The scholar does not attribute the gap to a simple matter of adoption timing. He says he is skeptical of the idea that non-tech companies are catching up with Big Tech: turning increasingly cheap artificial intelligence into higher revenue and margins will be difficult, he writes. His formulation, as cited by the source, is that AI can be an excellent calculator, but in business intelligence is above all judgment: responsibility, trust, corporate culture, unwritten rules and ethical trade-offs remain beyond the reach of models and are precisely the elements that weigh on reputation and profitability.
The material also signals a change in tone from the past: the source, citing Yahoo Finance, recalls that many of Slok's previous research pieces had been more favorable toward the economic boom linked to AI and to the creation of new businesses thanks to these tools. Today's note adds to recent studies that find no significant productivity gains.
Rising spending and the quarterly earnings test
The cited data indicate that AI spending is growing at the top of the index while the rest remains flat. Ramp, a corporate expense management platform, finds AI adoption at 55.9% among client companies in September, with two consecutive months of near-zero growth in token spending. Gartner estimates that more than $3.5 trillion in AI infrastructure risks impairment by 2030 if revenue does not justify the spending.
On the financing front, the source reports Elon Musk's statement that SpaceX has closed $40 billion in GPU-related debt and that credit markets have nearly shut their taps to companies without substantial revenue outside AI. The test, according to the material, comes in the coming weeks: if quarterly earnings from companies outside Big Tech do not show rising margins, investors' attention will shift from how much AI costs to how much it returns. For Italian companies, which according to the source are still defining budgets and pilot projects, the indicated signal is to measure the return before expanding spending.
