An Apollo Economist Says AI Has Delivered Zero Financial Payoff Outside Tech

An economist at Apollo has put a blunt number on the artificial intelligence boom: zero.

"Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech," the economist said, in remarks reported by TechCrunch.

Read the carve-out

The claim is narrower and sharper than "AI does not work", and the qualifier is doing the work: outside of tech.

Inside technology, the returns are not in dispute — chipmakers, cloud providers and model developers are booking real revenue, much of it from each other. The question is what happens at the other end of the pipe, where the insurance company, the retailer and the logistics firm were supposed to convert those tools into margin. The assertion is that, in aggregate, they have not yet.

That is the asymmetry worth sitting with. A capital cycle in which the suppliers of a technology earn handsomely and the adopters earn nothing is sustainable only while adopters keep spending on the expectation of a return they are not yet seeing.

What it means for a firm in Addis

The temptation is to read this as permission to wait. That is the wrong conclusion, but so is its opposite.

The useful reading is about sequencing. If the largest and best-resourced companies in the world have not yet converted AI spending into measurable financial returns, then an Ethiopian firm with a fraction of their data, systems and engineering capacity should not be budgeting on the assumption that a licence purchase produces one. The returns that do exist are concentrated in narrow, measurable tasks — a specific document process, a specific support queue — not in enterprise-wide transformation.

There is also a cost-side argument that cuts the other way here. Where the binding constraint is scarce skilled labour rather than cheap labour, as it is in much of Ethiopian professional services, the arithmetic is more favourable than it is for a US firm substituting for staff it can already hire.

Open

The analysis covers corporate America and is an aggregate finding; it does not establish that no individual company has earned a return, nor how long a lag between adoption and payoff should be expected. The underlying methodology was not published with the quoted remarks.

Sources: TechCrunch, 25 October 2026