The share of U.S. businesses paying for artificial intelligence products rose to 56.1% in August, an increase of 0.4 percentage points from July, according to the latest Ramp AI Index, which tracks transactions from more than 70,000 companies using the payments company’s corporate card and bill pay platform.
The August reading marks a slowdown from earlier in the year. Ramp’s index showed a similar flattening between August and October of last year before growth resumed in the fourth quarter. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey, updated Aug. 23, put AI adoption at 22.1% of businesses.
Adoption varied by company size. Sixty-six point eight percent of large businesses had AI spending in August, compared with 62.5% of medium-sized businesses and 50.1% of small businesses. The spending pattern ran in the opposite direction. Median monthly AI spend per employee was $23.23 at small businesses, $9.32 at medium-sized businesses and $3.68 at large businesses.
By sector, technology and media companies spent a median of $80.15 per employee per month, followed by finance and insurance at $41.24, professional, scientific and technical services at $33.33 and manufacturing at $9.84.
Across all firms, median monthly AI spend per employee was $12.50. Businesses in the top 10% spent $675.60 per employee. The top 1% spent $7,205.13, a decline of nearly 10% from the prior month.
Ramp attributed part of the decline at the top of the distribution to falling token prices. Average token costs fell to $0.68 per million tokens in August from a 2026 peak of $1.15 per million in March, following price cuts by OpenAI and Anthropic. Competition between the two companies is making AI more accessible while also reducing spend at the largest AI customers. Only 6.4% of AI-spending businesses used model-serving or inference platforms in August.
Ramp defines adoption as a positive payment for an AI product or service in a given month, identified through merchant names and receipt line items. Spend per employee divides observed AI spending by matched employee counts. The company said its figures likely understate actual adoption because free tools and personal accounts used for work do not generate corporate transactions.
