Apollo Economist Sees No Broad AI Payoff Beyond Big Tech

Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok said on October 24 that aggregate financial and productivity measures show no visible payoff from artificial intelligence outside the largest technology companies so far, challenging claims that corporate AI spending is already producing broad returns.

His analysis compares the Magnificent Seven with the other 493 companies in the S&P 500. Apollo’s charts show inflation-adjusted revenue per worker and profit margins rising for the seven-company group while both measures remain broadly flat for the S&P 493.

The first chart tracks revenue per worker, adjusted for inflation using the fourth quarter of 2019 as its base. The second tracks profit margins. Both credit Bloomberg, Macrobond and Apollo Chief Economist as data sources, but the published page does not include the company-level observations, weights or formulas needed to reproduce the comparisons.

The result is an aggregate contrast, not a causal estimate of AI’s effect. The analysis does not control for sector mix, pricing, demand, capital intensity, acquisitions, layoffs or other factors that can move revenue per worker and margins. It also does not report adoption data or returns for individual AI projects, so it cannot establish that AI caused the gap or that every deployment outside the Magnificent Seven failed to produce a return.

That limitation is also important when evaluating claims of AI-driven corporate efficiency: group-level results can move for reasons unrelated to one technology.

Revenue per worker is not the same as an official economy-wide productivity measure. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says it does not calculate a standalone measure of AI’s contribution. Gains from AI, automation and robotics would instead appear within broader labor-productivity and total-factor-productivity measures, alongside many other influences. Total factor productivity is the portion of output growth not explained by measured labor and capital inputs.

Those broader measures are mixed. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s series, updated October 8, shows total factor productivity rose 1.42% over the four quarters through the second quarter of 2026, while its utilization-adjusted measure fell 0.07%. The adjusted quarterly annualized readings were negative in both the first and second quarters of 2026. The adjustment accounts for changes in labor effort and capital’s workweek, as well as the composition of labor and capital.

A separate September analysis from the San Francisco Fed estimated that capital investment and factor utilization contributed 1.3 percentage points to labor-productivity growth since 2023. It put total factor productivity growth over that period at 0.7%, above the 0.5% pace from 2005 to 2022 but below the 2% pace from 1996 to 2004.