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News · 2026-10-25

Apollo economist says most companies see no financial return from AI

@neuronium_ai @neuronium_ai

Apollo economist Torsten Slok argues that most companies are getting “no financial return” from AI. His point is not simply that businesses outside tech are behind the giants: cheaper intelligence may still be hard to turn into higher revenue and profit. The gap is between what AI can calculate and what business decisions require, including judgment about responsibility, trust and reputation.

Cover: Apollo economist says most companies see no financial return from AI

The hard part is converting intelligence into returns

Slok says AI may work well as a calculator, but business intelligence is largely the ability to make decisions. Those decisions depend on factors that models do not understand, including:

Source: techcrunch.com

Responsibility and trust
Corporate culture and unwritten rules
Ethical trade-offs and fairness

These considerations can shape reputational risk, which ultimately affects revenue growth and profit margins. Lower-cost AI, in other words, does not automatically translate into better business results.

Recent research also suggests AI has not yet produced a significant increase in productivity.

The missing link

I think the more important question is not whether AI can perform useful tasks, but whether companies can change how they make decisions around it. Slok’s argument points to a gap between cheaper cognitive tools and the human, organizational judgments that influence financial outcomes.

That leaves a difficult test for AI adoption: if productivity gains remain limited and responsibility-sensitive decisions still depend on context, falling costs alone may not be enough to lift profits.

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