Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok has now said it twice: AI has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech. Revenue per worker and profit margins are rising for the Magnificent 7 and flat for the S&P 493. Profit margins across the S&P 500 have gotten worse since ChatGPT launched in November 2022. The winners are Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and NVIDIA. Everyone else is running AI as a cost center that weighs on margins.
Four years into the bubble, the productivity gains that justify mass AI adoption do not show up in any standard business metric: not ROIC for hyperscalers, not margins for mainstream corporates, not revenue per worker outside of a handful of companies. Meta is now raising nearly $100 billion through equity sales to fund further AI expansion while returns on existing AI capital are declining. The standard industry rebuttal, that organizations have not yet fully integrated AI into their workflows, is not an answer. It is a moving goalpost dressed as a roadmap.
The full piece is worth reading for how it dismantles the deliberate rhetorical strategy behind AI boosterism: years of steering measurement away from profit, productivity, and return on capital toward softer proxies that cannot be falsified. Slok's charts are included and they are not ambiguous. The question Zitron leaves open is how long mainstream corporate America keeps paying before the pullback becomes a rout.
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