A capability nobody owns
The subscription got bought because what it does is genuinely impressive, and because standing still felt worse than spending. No regret in that. Still, ask what changed in the week and the answer goes soft, because the office runs the same way it ran before.
Follow-up still happens when somebody remembers. Quotes still go out and sit there. The tool was bought as a capability, which is the same as buying a better calculator for the whole building: available to everyone, assigned to no one, responsible for nothing.
What the numbers showed
Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, recently published a note on what AI has done to the finances of large corporations. He took the S&P 500, removed Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla, and looked at the 493 companies that were left.
In that group he found profit margins and revenue per worker flat, with no evidence that AI is improving productivity. His words were that despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech. Asked whether the non-tech companies are simply lagging behind the tech giants, he sounded skeptical, and argued it will be tough for corporate America to turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins. Recent studies have also found no significant productivity gains.
Judgment is not the job
Slok named the reason in one sentence. AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment. He listed what the software does not understand: accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs and fairness, all of which shape reputational risk and in the end drive revenue growth and profit margins.
Read that as an instruction rather than a warning. The parts of your company that run on judgment, which price to hold, which customer to keep, which crew to send Monday, stay with the people who earned the right to decide. What is left over is the repeating work that surrounds those decisions, and a calculator is exactly what that work has been waiting for.
What changes this week
Pick one task that repeats and carries no judgment. The inquiry that arrives at eight at night and gets answered at ten the next morning. The estimate sent eleven days ago that nobody has circled back on. Your office manager owns it, you write down what the software is allowed to say and where it has to stop, and the first version runs this week.
What you notice by Friday is small and countable. Inquiries answered the same hour instead of the next day. A callback list that reaches the bottom. Hours back in the week of the person who was doing it by hand. The spend stops being a capability you hope pays off and becomes one task that left your week and did not come back.