AI delivers 'zero financial payoff' to most companies, Apollo economist says

The same Apollo Global Research partner, Torsten Slok, also published this widely cited story in September 2025 last year, "AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies": https://www.apolloacademy.com/ai-adoption-rate-trending-down...

I don't think that one has held up very well. A cynic might opine that they've realized how easy it is to grab headlines and attention by putting out research that feeds people who are hungry for negative stories about AI.

Does for us (data science, specialty chemistry, finding/optimizing formulas). We can get from idea to prototype in a day compared to 1-2 weeks. All that boilerplate to process data took a long time to code by hand, especially for the data science/math guys who are not programmers. Now we can actually try all ideas instead of guessing the most promising and only try that.

This is a complete misrepresentation of what the Apollo piece can actually show, because it's not measuring the "payoff" of AI investments, but only the top level revenue of those companies (https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-s...).

This is a healthy corrective to the most insane AI maximalist takes (mass disemployment in late 2027, 10% GDP growth in a year), but it shows nothing about whether the actual economic impact of AI spending is.

First, to show that, you'd have to justify the counterfactuals (if those companies hadn't spent on AI, would their position be better or worse?)

Second, while AI spending is increasing rapidly, normal companies aren't spending 1% of their revenue on it. So how can you look at a noisy chart of revenue and expect that "oh, it's not up, the AI spending must be useless?" Those companies could be spending < 1% of their revenue on AI, deriving value from it, and it wouldn't be guaranteed to show in a chart like this.

I noticed an interesting phenomenon

Your company uses AI and it gets ahead a lot quicker. However, your competition does so as well.

Many areas of economy are zero sum game - so your $ ends up being the same as previously. However, now with a "tax" paid to AI model providers for being able to stay competetive.

Here goes ANT's IPO. If it's only AI agents which deliver value, I don't see how they can justify their proposed market cap.

I suspect the reason is the industry just does not want engineers to be mostly technical. There's a real tradeoff to AI, and I think companies are taking the wrong lesson and thinking "well now that programming is so easy, engineers need to do more of XYZ", when I think it should be "this tool is powerful but also takes more focus so engineers should do less of XYZ".

If you are a company and can't figure out how to improve your bottom line through increased per person productvity, sales, product development, even just responses to customers etc, then that seems kind of like a "you" problem and not problem of the AI models...

What I'd really want to see is revenue and profit per employee over time tracked against token usage/spend, and not limited to the S&P 493.

Apollo's own argument that most AI spend is coming from non-S&P 493 (as per the last two charts) tells me it's hard to make any conclusions based on these charts.

Unless you are selling lines of code, or math theorems, that's going to be the case.

I'm guessing "most companies" are actually selling something that isn't constrained by the types of things that AI code generators unlock.

I wonder if that zero becomes negative if a company doesn't use AI.

Big discussion last week (653 points, 698 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224463

When it's the right tool, it's a silver bullet. When it's the wrong tool...or not the right tool yet, you can spend more time steering it than you would doing it yourself.

I'm seeing another behavior in my purely personal research...asking AI 'can I do the thing?' and it comes back with 18 pages of 'yes, and here's how you do it'. Often it's the discovery that produces the endorphin bump. It's cool to know I can jailbreak the Peloton...and now that I know I can...I'm not so motivated to actually do the thing.

My suspicion is that this is because AI employee-type systems like Dots or Grokbot just haven't been adopted yet. I think once they're good enough, that's going to be the catalyst for a lot of these companies to start adopting and using AI productively.

The company I work for insists on sending a crew from Engineering, Product, and Sales out to a customer site as part of our sales process. I'm personally much more productive using AI, but that only goes so far when closing a deal still follows a process stuck in the 50s.

I talk to a lot of non-tech friends and sometimes ask about AI. Most of them still use ChatGPT like it is a better Google. Most don't know it can work well with documents, PDFs, Slides, Sheets, or do advanced analytics, etc.

Much less do they know the thing can build software and maintain it, manage complex tasks daily, automate things, etc.

Then there's a handful that do follow closely AI developments and agents and who have started using them.

A friend of mine this weekend who is an award winning photographer and who has been selling photography courses online forever has told me he's used Muse to: 1) Automate chopping up his long form videos, add captions, and post them as Reels to Instagram. Several of these have gotten over a million views. 2) Automate handling DM reachouts, converting them into sales. He's up to several tens of thousands of dollars in sales from AI direct message conversions that he would otherwise not have been able to convert (too many DMs to handle, he'd have to hire/train sales people to basically just do DMs full time at scale otherwise and it would make no economical sense) 3) Automate all his customer service for handling any issues, refunds, support, etc.

And I personally think he's still just scratching the surface of what he could do.

I feel we are really at the beginning of a new era. When the internet started most people were just using it for e-mail and news, maybe a newsletter chain here and there and some early forums. Social Media didn't appear for well over a decade, popular Web 2.0 apps like Google Maps, GMail, YouTube, Netflix, etc didn't appear for a long time.

Mainstream hasn't even really begun to adopt AI.

Which is fine if not using AI is a negative payoff.

It makes sense to me and I'm saying this as a strong believer in AI and its ability to add value.

The system itself doesn't reward value creation. I've been saying this for years. I've seen many smart people waste their time on bureaucracy; their intelligence was being wasted; so I'm not surprised at all that now that we have AI, that its intelligence is being wasted as well.

The bottleneck is an allocation issue, not a capability issue.

The current reality is that a lot of very bright people are currently working for big tech in bureaucratic roles and not allowed to focus their attention on 'risky' problems which would deliver real value if resolved.

The current system prioritizes monopolization and is designed to try to ensure that all innovation happens within big tech. It is sacrificing potential innovation which could have occurred much faster outside of big tech in order to ensure that any gains are captured by big tech... But it's sacrificing an enormous about of efficiency.

I hope big AI companies can use their political leverage to try to open up opportunities for people who want to innovate outside of big tech. That's aligned with their long term interests.

I think AI companies are convenient structures which could allow big funds to benefit from decentralized innovation. Could create real win-win scenarios. But those AI companies have to stop pursuing the corporate and government money and prioritize small customers and support small tool makers (or at least lobby the government to stop hindering them with regulations). Also, bootstrapping should be prioritized because VC money mostly creates moats.

Am I the only one even mildly suspicious that the AI/datacenter bubble is not being driven by actual demand but rather by a rogue AI that wants to evolve?

I really don’t know what to tell people other than, you’re missing the point - it’s not a faster horse.

Anyone agreeing with this headline - I’m sorry in advance for your loss.

Well I think we can replace economists working for PE companies with AI now!

This is like claiming that the web is a failure in 2001.

Can’t help that many people who are good at leveraging AI to build things sit around one upping each other on twitter all day instead of going out there and building cool stuff for less technical people.

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I used to respect economists - I don't know why - probably because I never had any reason to think about them.

Then I realized every one of them has their own deep biases and slants towards how they think the world should work.

There is not "true economy" and there is no "economic reality".

Economists are shamans and self interested hacks.

Economics is a long way from a science.

Always research their history and positions and pronouncements and find out who is paying their bills.