AI has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside tech, says Apollo's chief economist.

The S&P 500 has seven companies making serious money from AI. The other 493, it turns out, are not.

That is the finding from Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, who looked at profit margins and revenue per worker across the S&P 500 with the obvious names stripped out. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla: gone. What remains is most of corporate America, and what remains shows no measurable improvement from AI at all. Flat margins. Flat productivity. "Zero financial payoff," in Slok's own words.

Slok is also sceptical this is just a lag problem. His argument is that turning cheap intelligence into revenue requires judgment, not calculation, and that AI currently lacks the thing businesses actually run on: accountability, culture, unwritten rules, the ability to read a room before you say something that ends up in a lawsuit.

"AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment" is the kind of sentence that should be printed somewhere near every AI procurement decision made in the last two years.

The hype budgets, unfortunately, are already spent.