Apollo's Chief Economist Says AI Has Delivered Zero Payoff Outside Tech. That Gap Is a New Audit Business for Whoever Proves ROI First.

What actually happened

Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, published a note arguing that despite "massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech."

His evidence is a split screen: revenue per worker and profit margins are rising for the Mag 7, but flat for the S&P 493 — the other 493 companies in the index that aren't the handful of AI-native giants. There's no sign, in his read of the data, of AI boosting broad productivity growth.

The behavioral shift he flags is the interesting part. Mainstream corporate America, he writes, is "pulling back and starting to view token spending not as a source of growth but as a cost center that weighs on margins." AI spending itself is "extremely concentrated in a small number of firms," while VC-backed companies keep burning tokens and everyone else "does not need the latest model and is unwilling to pay for it."

The gap this opens

Slok's own bottom line: "The AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7, and so far, there is no evidence that revenue growth or margins are improving outside the tech sector."

Read that again as a business owner instead of an economist. Hundreds of companies bought AI tools, ran pilots, gave people seats — and nobody inside most of them has been tasked with proving whether any of it moved a number the CFO actually tracks. The spend happened. The audit didn't.

That's not a reason to avoid selling AI services into this market. It's the opposite. It's an opening for whoever shows up with the one thing these companies don't have: a clean, honest answer to "did this pay for itself."

The business

You don't need a model, a platform, or a research team. You need to be the person willing to run the audit nobody inside the company wants to run on themselves.

1. Find the company already spending. Target firms that bought AI seats, ran a pilot, or signed an enterprise AI contract more than two quarters ago — old enough that there should be a before/after, but new enough that nobody's measured it.

2. Pick one metric the CFO already watches. Revenue per worker, cost per ticket, hours per contract reviewed — not "productivity," which Slok's own note shows is too abstract to move a budget decision.

3. Scope one workflow, not a platform review. Audit the highest-token-spend, lowest-proof workflow first. That's where the cost-center suspicion is strongest and the dollar number is easiest to isolate.

4. Deliver a number, not a recommendation deck. "This workflow returned $X for every $Y spent" (or didn't) is the entire deliverable. Recommending what to do about it is the upsell.

5. Sell the re-audit as a retainer. Spend is concentrated and shifting quarter to quarter — re-running the same audit each quarter is the recurring product, not the one-off report.

Who buys this

• Mid-market and enterprise finance teams that approved AI budget last year and now have to defend it in this year's review
• Operations leaders who rolled out an AI tool to a team and were never given a number to report back up
• Any company whose AI vendor renewal is coming up and needs an honest answer before they re-sign
• Consultants and fractional CFOs who want a concrete, billable service to attach to the AI conversation instead of vague "AI strategy" work

Bottom line

The hype cycle sold "adopt AI." Nobody sold "prove AI." Slok just handed every CFO in the S&P 493 the exact sentence they'll use to cut a budget line that can't show its work — "a cost center that weighs on margins." The business is getting there first with the number that proves otherwise, or the honest number that says it's time to cut.

Source: https://apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/no-signs-of-ai-payoff-outside-the-tech-sector