How much does it cost to be AI-pilled?
Today, we launched a new and improved version of our flagship research: Ramp AI Index.
What’s new: Since inception, Ramp AI Index has focused on tracking simple business adoption — are firms using AI? — but the share of businesses using AI is rapidly approaching 100%. Our focus at Ramp Economics Lab is shifting to tracking intensity of adoption. Our index now tracks:
- Spend per employee.
- Business spend on subscriptions vs. coding agents vs. tokens and APIs.
- More granular filters, like state, sector, business size, and funding background.
- What defines the firms furthest along the adoption curve, where the rest of the market may end up, and more in development.
We also made methodological updates to better track AI adoption across vendors. Our research uses aggregated and anonymized card and bill pay spend from more than 70K U.S. businesses on Ramp. You can download and explore the data here.
OpenAI vs. Anthropic: OpenAI holds flat
OpenAI was essentially flat, declining 0.1 percentage points to 39.5% of businesses. Anthropic rose 2.5 percentage points to 41%, remaining the leader in business adoption. We made methodological updates to our tracking to better capture enterprise spend on OpenAI and Anthropic. Anthropic now leads OpenAI by 1.5 percentage points.
The cost of being AI-pilled? $7,449 per employee per month.
Geoff Charles, Ramp’s head of product, recently published “How to get your company AI pilled.” The post described 8 ways Ramp achieved 99.5% AI adoption across its employee-base. It also sparked questions on the cost of AI adoption while ensuring ROI for firms.
So, What distinguishes the firms that use AI a lot versus the firms that are just starting out, and what can we learn from them about advanced AI adoption, and where the rest of the market might go? We used Ramp AI Index to identify AI pilled companies, the top 1% by AI spend per employee. Here’s what we found.
Finding 1: AI-pilled firms have significantly higher budgets per employee, but it’s still a fraction of payroll spend.
The top 1% of firms spend $7.45K per employee per month. The top 10% spend $611 per employee per month. The median firm spends just $11.38 – about the cost of a seat on an enterprise ChatGPT or Claude subscription.
And while several high-profile proclamations have said you should be spending as much on AI as you do on a software engineer’s salary…no one is actually doing that. For the top 1% of spenders, per employee AI spend is still less than half the typical monthly salary for an engineer. Not to say that won’t change – AI spend is still rising – but very few firms, if any, are actually doing that.
Finding 2: AI spend is rising despite cost pressures.
The top 1% of firms grew spend per employee 14.1% last month. That said, we previously found evidence firms are increasingly opting for cheaper AI models, including ones from DeepSeek, the Chinese competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic. So while firms are applying cost discipline on the margin, that’s a function of total spend rising, and rising faster than firms’ willingness to switch to cheaper solutions.
Finding 3: No vendor lock-in. AI-pilled firms use multiple AI vendors.
Advanced usage of AI means using 1) multiple frontier models, 2) platforms that supply access to open-source models, 3) verticalized solutions like voice agents and other AI-native SaaS. For this analysis, we used a fairly narrow definition of “AI vendor” (essentially just the main LLM providers, AI infrastructure providers, and some highly specialized AI-native vendors).
