AI delivers ‘zero financial payoff’ to most companies, Apollo economist says
Zero financial payoff is a stark way to put it, and coming from an Apollo economist, the claim carries weight. The argument is essentially that most companies are spending on AI out of fear of being left behind, not because projects return measurable value. Outside tech, where AI is the product itself, the ROI story gets thin fast.
We're a couple of years into the generative AI boom, past the point where early pilots can be excused as experiments. If the payoff were coming, we'd expect to see it in margins or productivity numbers by now. Instead we hear about proof-of-concept purgatory and vendors selling tooling nobody quite knows how to use. AI can still deliver real value outside tech, but the deployment problem remains the bottleneck.
What I'd want to know next is how Apollo defines payoff. If it means bottom-line profit, that's one bar. If it includes cost avoidance or incremental efficiency, the picture might look different. The headline is designed to sting, but the real story is that companies are still figuring out where AI actually earns its keep.