If you work in tech, AI feels like it's everywhere. It writes code, reviews pull requests, generates images, edits video, and answers support tickets. Every week there's a new model, a new tool, a new demo that makes last month's look old.

So it’s a little jarring to read what Torsten Slok, the chief economist at Apollo, published this week: outside the tech sector , AI has delivered essentially no financial payoff to corporate America.

Not a small payoff. Not a slower one. According to his charts, basically nothing yet.

Two economies, one technology

Slok splits the S&P 500 into two groups. On one side are the "Magnificent 7", the giant tech companies at the center of the AI boom. On the other side are the remaining 493 companies: banks, retailers, manufacturers, insurers, healthcare firms, the ordinary businesses that make up most of the economy.

For the big tech companies, revenue per worker is rising and profit margins are going up. For the other 493, both lines are flat.…