DIGITAL ECONOMY · ANALYSIS
Apollo economist questions AI’s financial returns
Torsten Slok says he sees no gains in margins or revenue per employee across a group of S&P companies. TechCrunch reports this interpretation, while the available excerpt details neither the observation period nor the method for attributing effects to AI.
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Are investments in AI already showing up in large companies’ financial results? According to a note by Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, the indicators he examines do not show such an improvement. TechCrunch reports his analysis in an article published on October 25, without specifying the note’s exact date.
Slok focuses on a group he calls the S&P 493: the S&P 500 excluding Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. In his reading, profit margins and revenue per employee appear to be stagnating, with no sign that AI is improving productivity. He also doubts companies’ ability to turn cheaper intelligence into growth in revenue and margins.
The scope of this finding needs to be defined. The excerpt provides neither a detailed observation period, nor a breakdown by actual AI adoption, nor a method for isolating its effect from other economic factors. It reports an interpretation of aggregate indicators, which is insufficient to establish the returns on each deployment.
The analytical challenge is therefore to distinguish between spending incurred, potential operational gains and their translation into financial results. The absence of visible improvement in the cited indicators leaves that relationship unresolved; it does not, on its own, demonstrate the absence of any profitable use.