The Massive Gap Behind the AI Boom: Tech Giants' Profit Margins Climb, While the Rest of the 493 U.S. Companies Stall Overall

Beating AI News Flash: Torsten Sløk, Chief Economist at US asset management giant Apollo, released five charts suggesting that AI has yet to deliver significant financial returns for large US companies outside of the tech giants.

Revenue per employee and profit margins for the Magnificent Seven tech giants continue to climb, but for the S&P 493 companies excluding them, these two metrics have remained essentially flat overall. US total factor productivity data also shows no clear sign of an AI-driven boost.

Apollo cited data from corporate payment platform Ramp and found that among the platform's clients, the top 10% of companies by spending accounted for 99.5% of model hosting and inference costs. Among the top 1% of companies by AI spending, about 80% are venture-backed, while among companies with median spending, that proportion is only 13%. A large share of AI compute consumption is concentrated in a small number of companies, many of which rely on venture capital support.

Corporate earnings reports also struggle to prove how much value AI actually creates. Apollo previously calculated that in the Q2 2026 earnings season, 69% of S&P 500 companies had disclosed that they are actually using AI, but only 2% published metrics for continuously tracking its effectiveness. Another NBER research survey updated in October this year polled nearly 9,000 corporate executives across seven countries. Respondents estimated that over the past three years, AI has boosted annual labor productivity growth by only about 0.2 percentage points.

AI can help employees write code, produce reports, and handle emails faster, but producing more things does not equal generating more revenue.