Apollo economist says AI’s payoff has yet to reach most U.S. companies

Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok says the AI boom has not yet translated into measurable financial gains for most large U.S. companies outside technology. His comparison separates the so-called Magnificent Seven tech giants from the other 493 companies in the S&P 500, where profit margins and revenue per employee have remained broadly flat. That matters because the case for AI as an economy-wide productivity engine depends less on whether chipmakers and cloud platforms benefit than on whether ordinary businesses can use it to sell more or operate more efficiently. Slok’s analysis does not mean AI has no value outside tech, but it suggests that the expensive experimentation so far has not produced a visible broad-based payoff.