The same Apollo Global Research partner, Torsten Slok, also published this widely cited story in September 2025 last year, "AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies": https://www.apolloacademy.com/ai-adoption-rate-trending-down...

I don't think that one has held up very well. A cynic might opine that they've realized how easy it is to grab headlines and attention by putting out research that feeds people who are hungry for negative stories about AI.

UPDATE: I'm going to take this one back a a bit: it turns out Apollo publish articles like this on a daily basis, so the occasional headline that appeals to the "hungry for negative stories about AI" crowd is less of a pattern than if they published less frequently than that.

Does for us (data science, specialty chemistry, finding/optimizing formulas). We can get from idea to prototype in a day compared to 1-2 weeks. All that boilerplate to process data took a long time to code by hand, especially for the data science/math guys who are not programmers. Now we can actually try all ideas instead of guessing the most promising and only try that.

This is a complete misrepresentation of what the Apollo piece can actually show, because it's not measuring the "payoff" of AI investments, but only the top level revenue of those companies (https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-s...).

This is a healthy corrective to the most insane AI maximalist takes (mass disemployment in late 2027, 10% GDP growth in a year), but it shows nothing about whether the actual economic impact of AI spending is.

First, to show that, you'd have to justify the counterfactuals (if those companies hadn't spent on AI, would their position be better or worse?)

Second, while AI spending is increasing rapidly, normal companies aren't spending 1% of their revenue on it. So how can you look at a noisy chart of revenue and expect that "oh, it's not up, the AI spending must be useless?" Those companies could be spending < 1% of their revenue on AI, deriving value from it, and it wouldn't be guaranteed to show in a chart like this.

I noticed an interesting phenomenon

Your company uses AI and it gets ahead a lot quicker. However, your competition does so as well.

Many areas of economy are zero sum game - so your $ ends up being the same as previously. However, now with a "tax" paid to AI model providers for being able to stay competetive.

If you are a company and can't figure out how to improve your bottom line through increased per person productvity, sales, product development, even just responses to customers etc, then that seems kind of like a "you" problem and not problem of the AI models...

When it's the right tool, it's a silver bullet. When it's the wrong tool...or not the right tool yet, you can spend more time steering it than you would doing it yourself.

I'm seeing another behavior in my purely personal research...asking AI 'can I do the thing?' and it comes back with 18 pages of 'yes, and here's how you do it'. Often it's the discovery that produces the endorphin bump. It's cool to know I can jailbreak the Peloton...and now that I know I can...I'm not so motivated to actually do the thing.

I suspect the reason is the industry just does not want engineers to be mostly technical. There's a real tradeoff to AI, and I think companies are taking the wrong lesson and thinking "well now that programming is so easy, engineers need to do more of XYZ", when I think it should be "this tool is powerful but also takes more focus so engineers should do less of XYZ".

First, if your company could double its workforce for free right now with 0 plans for how to convert the extra bodies into revenue, how long would it take them to see a return? Because from what I understand companies aren't leaving money on the table, if hiring someone would make them more money they just would. AI could help those that weren't maximizing revenue despite having high demand and a market because they were resource constrained. That doesn't describe very many large companies.

Second, I'm getting huge value from it, but I'm not making any money and none of it is being redirected. It's simply value that wouldn't have existed otherwise because I would have just gone without the thing because it was prohibitively expensive or too much work. I'm quite sure many companies and people have been unlocked in this way. Plenty of value locked up in an overly expensive economy dedicated to maximum value extraction instead of value creation.

Unless you are selling lines of code, or math theorems, that's going to be the case.

I'm guessing "most companies" are actually selling something that isn't constrained by the types of things that AI code generators unlock.

What I'd really want to see is revenue and profit per employee over time tracked against token usage/spend, and not limited to the S&P 493.

Apollo's own argument that most AI spend is coming from non-S&P 493 (as per the last two charts) tells me it's hard to make any conclusions based on these charts.

Big discussion last week (653 points, 698 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224463

It _is_ about judgment. The challenge is figuring out what defines “good judgment” and how to capture those elements in a format that an agent can assess continuously and at multiple levels.

The problem is most people don't know what makes them successful from a people perspective, except in the coarsest terms.

90% of the business outcomes are delivered by 10% of the people. The problem is they don't know which people. Therefore they also don't know which processes, if automated or augmented with AI, will achieve the target outcomes.

So instead they’re shotgunning. The problem is that the existing people-based system has built-in stabilizing mechanisms to prevent misalignment from taking the entire operation off course. AI stresses and often breaks those.

The result? Higher costs and chaos.

This needs to be treated like an org transformation. Traditionally that's most successfully done by starting a new small team that builds ground-up and eats the old team.

> “AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment,”

Bzzzt! Calculators do not hallucinate. AI bots and agents are nowadays jerry-rigged to use actual calculators for problems involving crunching.

being able to do more with less people is a payoff of its own sort. more people freed up to find other economic niches

>AI hasn’t benefited the bottom line of any big corporations outside the tech industry

If you get two companies that reduce their costs 50% but due to competition have to pass on their savings by reducing prices, the profits may remain the same even if AI works.

My suspicion is that this is because AI employee-type systems like Dots or Grokbot just haven't been adopted yet. I think once they're good enough, that's going to be the catalyst for a lot of these companies to start adopting and using AI productively.

That’s an interesting one. On a personal level, there are clear benefits. On a company level, there’s very little visible. Draw the ratio of operating profit to employee count over the past 10 years and there’s no change there you could clearly attribute to AI. It would seem the engineers are an important part of a machine, but not _the_ machine: there’s other bottlenecks that hide or consume personal-level gains.

My hunch is that AI can certainly speed up development but you have to walk a narrow path. It generates garbage much easier than valuable product.

The company I work for insists on sending a crew from Engineering, Product, and Sales out to a customer site as part of our sales process. I'm personally much more productive using AI, but that only goes so far when closing a deal still follows a process stuck in the 50s.

Here goes ANT's IPO. If it's only AI agents which deliver value, I don't see how they can justify their proposed market cap.

Let's just hope they don't do the same checking up on the impact of software more generally...

I wonder if that zero becomes negative if a company doesn't use AI.

It makes sense to me and I'm saying this as a strong believer in AI and its ability to add value.

The system itself doesn't reward value creation. I've been saying this for years. I've seen many smart people waste their time on bureaucracy; their intelligence was being wasted; so I'm not surprised at all that now that we have AI, that its intelligence is being wasted as well.

The bottleneck is an allocation issue, not a capability issue.

The current reality is that a lot of very bright people are currently working for big tech in bureaucratic roles and not allowed to focus their attention on 'risky' problems which would deliver real value if resolved.

The current system prioritizes monopolization and is designed to try to ensure that all innovation happens within big tech. It is sacrificing potential innovation which could have occurred much faster outside of big tech in order to ensure that any gains are captured by big tech... But it's sacrificing an enormous about of efficiency.

I hope big AI companies can use their political leverage to try to open up opportunities for people who want to innovate outside of big tech. That's aligned with their long term interests.

I think AI companies are convenient structures which could allow big funds to benefit from decentralized innovation. Could create real win-win scenarios. But those AI companies have to stop pursuing the corporate and government money and prioritize small customers and support small tool makers (or at least lobby the government to stop hindering them with regulations). Also, bootstrapping should be prioritized because VC money mostly creates moats.

Taking a step back wouldn't this be exactly the expected outcome for an emergent technology in a capitalist framework?

1. Execs with no understanding how business operates on the low level are pushing buzzwords.

2. People who want to get promoted deliver on buzzwords and get promoted. Note that the goal is to deliver the buzzword, not use the buzzword to make the business better.

3. Buzzwords do not help vast majority of companies because the incentives and needs are misaligned.

4. Eventually buzzwords settle, some find niches, some die off, and some take over the world.

Last two decades alone - big data, blockchain, crypto, web 3.0, gamification, VR, and now AI. TL:DR - we should expect vast majority of early AI adopters to have net negative to neutral experience. Assuming that AI is like electricity and automobiles more than blockchain we should expect that eventually companies that find a way to apply the tech correctly will eat those who do not.

Only if software broadly has “zero financial payoff”

This is like claiming that the web is a failure in 2001.

Many industries are simply not bottle-necked by intelligence.

Which is fine if not using AI is a negative payoff.

Have to wonder if Apollo has some short positions on the Mag7 or whatever.

"AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness"

...says a representative of a massive PE firm, those models of trust, accountability, ethics, and fairness.

The real flaw is the corporate structure. We don't need CEOs or execs that manage company direction. These people are useless due to AI.

The people who know how to get AI to make usable and viable solutions are the only people who should be running anything and their employees should be all doing the same.

A company should be built around people who can vibe engineer real end user products that are deploy-able and high quality.

Non-coding people are simply done now that AI can replace all of their "ideas", but cannot replace the engineer making the real decisions with the ideas that actually matter.

[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224463

I talk to a lot of non-tech friends and sometimes ask about AI. Most of them still use ChatGPT like it is a better Google. Most don't know it can work well with documents, PDFs, Slides, Sheets, or do advanced analytics, etc.

Much less do they know the thing can build software and maintain it, manage complex tasks daily, automate things, etc.

Then there's a handful that do follow closely AI developments and agents and who have started using them.

A friend of mine this weekend who is an award winning photographer and who has been selling photography courses online forever has told me he's used Muse to: 1) Automate chopping up his long form videos, add captions, and post them as Reels to Instagram. Several of these have gotten over a million views. 2) Automate handling DM reachouts, converting them into sales. He's up to several tens of thousands of dollars in sales from AI direct message conversions that he would otherwise not have been able to convert (too many DMs to handle, he'd have to hire/train sales people to basically just do DMs full time at scale otherwise and it would make no economical sense) 3) Automate all his customer service for handling any issues, refunds, support, etc.

And I personally think he's still just scratching the surface of what he could do.

I feel we are really at the beginning of a new era. When the internet started most people were just using it for e-mail and news, maybe a newsletter chain here and there and some early forums. Social Media didn't appear for well over a decade, popular Web 2.0 apps like Google Maps, GMail, YouTube, Netflix, etc didn't appear for a long time.

Mainstream hasn't even really begun to adopt AI.

Am I the only one even mildly suspicious that the AI/datacenter bubble is not being driven by actual demand but rather by a rogue AI that wants to evolve?

Well I think we can replace economists working for PE companies with AI now!

Can’t help that many people who are good at leveraging AI to build things sit around one upping each other on twitter all day instead of going out there and building cool stuff for less technical people.

Well duh look no further than this site itself. "SUPER" AGI that can solve a millenial problems, and the top voted thing we can do with it is take the ads away from netflix-tier content distribitors, basically piracy.

I just finished a $23k engineering job in 3 months, entirely solo, that would have taken a year without these tools. That’s real money to feed my kids and working tech that made a client happy.

That’s one job and I have several in the pipe.

The “financial payoff” for no more than a few 100 a month at absolute most is there and it’s real. If you aren’t seeing it then you’re doing it wrong.

I usually don’t even spend more than $20 a month each for chpt and claude, deepseek free is solid. I am about to switch fully local too so that should drop to basically cost of watts.

I dunno what yall are doing

I really don’t know what to tell people other than, you’re missing the point - it’s not a faster horse.

Anyone agreeing with this headline - I’m sorry in advance for your loss.

AI hasn’t benefited the bottom line of any big corporations outside the tech industry

I am not an "AI booster", it seems like the current market leaders have dug a hole that they'll have a hard time getting out of. Just about everyone says something like "there's a bubble, it will burst, people will be hurt but the process will go on, like the Internet or railroads". But that ignore that the scale of this is beyond earlier bubbles (each bubble is larger than the last in our 30-40 year bubble-and-pop driven economy but that might not be comforting).

All that said, "some aren't benefiting" or "the average isn't benefiting" is a disingenuous argument if you want to say things are bad. AI companies have more of a real product people are paying than Google did. A large minority of companies (not all in the tech industry) are getting a boost. It's easy to say "the average is zero" when you exclude some. AI has boosted media companies that do a lot of transcription. Video generation serves half of advertising videos.

Reg: "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health... what have the Romans ever done for us?" Attendee: "Brought peace?" Reg:"Oh, peace? Shut up!"

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I spent almost 14 years at an S&P 500 company. I think it largely comes down to where the bottleneck is.

In some organizations, it doesn't matter whether you produce 1x or 10x as much work. If the process says reviews happen on Mondays and deployment decisions are made at the end of the month, getting your work done faster won't change much.

I'm at a much smaller company now, and we've doubled our feature delivery rate while increasing code coverage and overall product quality. We've also tripled our marketing content output, which was an area where we'd been falling behind.

AI can significantly improve individual productivity, but whether that translates into business results depends on how the organization operates.

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