Since 2022, the AI boom has created a striking split in corporate results. For the biggest technology companies, revenue per employee rose from roughly $550,000 to nearly $800,000, while margins climbed sharply. Among the rest of the S&P 500, the comparable revenue figure has hovered near $550,000 for years and profit margins have remained around 10%.¹

That divergence sits at the heart of a recent analysis by Torsten Slok, Apollo Global Management’s chief economist. Stripping Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla from the index, he examined what he calls the “S&P 493” — and found flat margins and revenue per worker, with no sign that AI is lifting productivity.²

Slok’s conclusion is deliberately blunt: “Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech.”² In his account, mainstream companies are no longer treating modest AI spending as a growth engine, but increasingly as a cost that pressures margins.¹

The report does not dispute that AI has transformed the economics of the Magnificent Seven. Instead, it challenges the assumption that their gains will automatically spread to manufacturers, retailers, banks and other large employers. Economy-wide productivity growth, Apollo notes, has yet to make the dramatic jump predicted by AI’s most ardent advocates.¹

For Slok, cheaper and more capable models may not solve the central problem. “AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment,” he wrote, arguing that accountability, trust, culture and ethical trade-offs still shape reputational risk, revenues and margins.² The test ahead is whether corporate America can turn abundant machine intelligence into durable commercial returns — or keep paying for a promise that remains concentrated in tech.