Opinion

Apollo's chief economist says AI has delivered 'zero financial payoff' outside tech. The real test: does it actually get you customers?

Torsten Slok's October 24 Daily Spark found flat revenue per worker and flat margins across the S&P 493 despite massive AI investment — and started treating token spend as a cost center. For a founder, the question is sharper.

By Aaron Gerstle· Opinion & analysis·2026-10-25·3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Mika Baumeister — A laptop displaying rows of financial data on a desk

Apollo Global Management’s chief economist Torsten Slok published a note on October 24, 2026, titled “No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector,” arguing that two years of corporate AI spend have produced zero financial payoff for the S&P 493, flat revenue per worker, flat margins, inflation-adjusted against a Q4 2019 base. The framing matters as much as the finding. Slok’s Daily Spark treats token spend as a cost center.

The concentration data he cites, drawn from the Ramp AI Index via Ramp’s chief economist Ara Kharazian, is where the story sharpens. Among the top 1% of AI spenders, 80.4% are VC-backed and 19.6% aren’t. Flip to median spenders and the ratio inverts: 13.1% VC-backed, 86.9% not. The top 10% of firms account for 99.5% of model-serving and inference spend, 99.0% of neocloud, 95.7% of cloud computing, 95.6% of OpenAI and Anthropic, 91.9% of paid ads, 91.8% of SaaS excluding AI, and 84.2% of CRM. AI, like every enterprise software wave before it, is a top-decile phenomenon.

Slok’s October 20 note already flagged declining trailing-12-month ROIC at Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle. Slok expects hyperscaler capex to reach roughly 3% of US GDP annually between 2027 and 2029. YipitData panels show token prices down roughly 50% year over year. The returns many AI investors expect sit above 10% against a 4% Fed funds rate and a 125 bps rise in 10-year yields. Nvidia’s $96.221 billion quarter, 106% growth, 75% gross margin, 92.5% Data Center concentration, 16% from a single customer, reports again November 17 with $108 billion guidance.

For a founder-led business spending on AI, the Slok chart is the whole question. Is it getting you customers, or is it overhead that feels productive?

That’s the test LemonLime is built around. It isn’t a dashboard or a copilot; it prepares finished sales and marketing work, every output a customer-growth action. Related reading: ChatGPT ads now reach SMBs across 89 countries and Stripe’s agentic commerce acceleration. Slok drew the line between tech and everyone else. The question is which side of it your spend sits on.

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