April 14, 2025

The Spring 2025 Business Spending Report is here

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We’re proud to share Ramp’s Business Spending Report. In this edition, we examine trends in AI, advertising, and general business spend.

Why do we publish these reports? There is no public dataset that captures where, how much, and on what American businesses spend.

Plenty of economists (across businesses, governments, and academia) track and analyze consumer spending data. Very few track business spending, which amounts to over $25 trillion transacted annually—36% more than total U.S. consumer spend. Ramp is uniquely positioned to address this gap in public research.

Download our Business Spending Report featuring The Ramp AI Index

Spring 2025 key findings

In addition to total business spend analysis, this report introduces a new piece of ongoing research called The Ramp AI Index. Economists are carefully watching how AI will transform productivity and growth, and understanding AI adoption is the first step in drawing these conclusions. Our data shows, among other things, that businesses are adopting AI at a higher rate and lower cost than previously reported.

Here’s what we uncovered:

  1. Ramp data shows that 35.5% of U.S. businesses already use AI, led by the tech, finance, and manufacturing sectors.
  2. OpenAI is the definitive leader in business adoption among AI model companies, followed by Anthropic.
  3. Large businesses are drawing down advertising spend while small businesses are spending more. We see 53% of large companies maintaining or decreasing ad spend year-over-year, while 55% of small businesses are increasing ad dollars year-over-year.
  4. TikTok’s ad platform leads in year-over-year spend growth, signaling advertisers have not been deterred by the prospect of a ban.
  5. Total business spend is stable quarter-over-quarter.

Download the free report to read our complete analysis.

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Ara KharazianLead Economist, Ramp
Ara Kharazian is the lead economist at Ramp and writes the weekly newsletter Econ Lab on Substack. His writing and analysis of AI, business spend, and the economy has been covered in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, NBC News, ABC News, NPR's Planet Money, Bloomberg, the Guardian and more. Ara previously led economic research at Square and was an economic consultant at Cornerstone Research.
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