Apollo analysis shows no one besides the biggest tech giants is seeing benefits from AI
SiliconANGLE Mike Wheatley ● Covered by 5 sources
Apollo says AI is only paying off for the biggest tech firms. For everyone else, revenue and margins look stuck, which is a nasty reality check for the hype.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Mike Wheatley — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Apollo Global Management says the AI boom is not spreading through corporate America the way the cheerleaders promised. In a Saturday analysis, the firm argued that the S&P 493 — the index after stripping out Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla — has not yet seen a financial payoff from its AI spending.
The contrast with the biggest tech names is sharp. Apollo analyst Torsten Slok says revenue per employee at those companies has climbed from an average of $550,000 in 2022 to almost $800,000 this year. Outside that group, the figure has sat at about $550,000 since 2019. Profit margins tell the same story: they have surged for the tech giants since the third quarter of 2023, while staying roughly flat for everyone else.
Slok also pointed to productivity growth, which he described as messy but not encouraging. The charts, he said, do not show AI helping the average company do materially more work with the same resources. That runs straight against the idea that AI will usher in an age of abundance, where companies get leaner and workers get more time away from the grind.
There’s also a spending story here. Some venture-backed startups are still buying AI tokens aggressively, but more established firms are backing away. Slok says mainstream corporate America does not need the newest model and does not want to pay for it, especially if the return shows up as a cost center instead of growth. His broader point is blunt: the AI macro story will be decided outside the tech elite, and so far the evidence there is thin.
He argues that business judgment is the hard part AI still can’t really handle. Models can calculate, search and generate, but they struggle with context, accountability, culture, fairness, trust and the kind of reputational risk that actually moves revenue. Cheap intelligence sounds nice. Turning it into higher margins is another matter entirely.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the part of the AI story that the pitch decks politely skip: most firms are still buying the demo, not the payoff. The market loves a miracle until it has to show up in margins, and then the magic gets very ordinary very fast.
Read more about this at: SiliconANGLE
