Apollo's Chief Economist: AI Has Delivered 'Zero Payoff' Outside Tech
HankYeomans · x · 2026-10-26
Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok argues AI has produced "zero financial payoff" for US companies outside the tech sector. Revenue per worker and profit margins have risen for the "Magnificent Seven" but stagnated across the S&P 493, with no clear AI-driven productivity growth. Mainstream corporate America is pulling back, viewing token spending as a margin-weighing cost center rather than a growth source. Commenter Hank Yeomans adds that AI companies' forward-deployed engineers aren't addressing embedded business needs, putting tokennomics in the same cost-center boat as legacy IT/OT.
More from AGI Musings
- New paper: AI agents negotiate badly under uncertainty and break deals on purpose — menhguin · 2026-10-26
- NBER: Only 2.9% of US consumers pay for AI; retention as low as 20%, pricing power at risk — avicgoldfarb · 2026-10-26
- AI researchers guessed robots wouldn't outrun humans until 2034 — it already happened — ben_j_todd · 2026-10-26
- AI folks, stop saying "biology" when you mean drug development — KevinKaichuang · 2026-10-26
- ESR on the Bugpocalypse: locking down frontier models only hands the game to Chinese open weights — colinmcnamara · 2026-10-26
- Anthropic: junior tech hires fell from 27% to 9% as agent hours hit 6x employee hours — thione · 2026-10-26