In Brief
Posted:
9:57 AM PDT · October 25, 2026
AI hasn’t benefited the base row of any big corporations exterior the tech industry, according to a note lately published by the chief economist at Apollo Global Management (the personal equity elephantine that used to own TechCrunch).
Apollo’s Torsten Slok focuses on what he calls the S&P 493 — the S&P 500, minus Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla — finding that gain margins and income per employee appear to be flat, alongside no evidence that AI is improving productivity.
“Despite enormous investments and general hype about synthetic intelligence, the innovation has delivered zero financial payoff to company America exterior of tech,” Slok said.
Is this merely a matter of non-tech companies lagging rearward the tech giants? Slok echoed skeptical, arguing that it volition be durable for company America to “turn increasingly cheap intellect into higher income growth and higher gain margins.”
“AI may be a awesome calculator, but in business, intellect is mostly judgment,” he wrote, afterward adding, “AI does not comprehend accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness, all of which form reputational hazard and ultimately run income growth and gain margins.”
Recent studies have additionally found that AI has yet to provision important efficiency gains.
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