Business AI adoption grew 2% in July

Ara Kharazian

Economist, Ramp

New Ramp data shows AI adoption re-accelerated in July, reversing a summer slowdown but still below early 2025 highs.

The Ramp AI Index shows AI adoption rose to 43.3% in July 2025, up from 41.3% in June. The manufacturing and construction sectors were the fastest-growing adopters of new AI spend, with adoption growing three percentage points in both sectors.

What changed?

According to Ramp data, AI adoption fell slightly in June. The 2% increase in July reverses the negative trend but shows adoption has slowed from the several-percentage-point increases we observed month-over-month earlier in the year.
A surprise result from the government estimate this month: the U.S. Census Business Trends and Outlook Survey, which tracks AI adoption by businesses, found AI adoption fell to 8.4% of businesses (down from 9.3% in June).
We believe the government estimate, which relies on survey data, is underreporting actual AI adoption by U.S. businesses. Our methodology explains why in detail.
xAI more than doubled the number of businesses on its paid platform. The share of businesses using xAI rose from 0.6% to 1.5% in July. It was also one of our fastest-growing vendors last month.
Anthropic is rapidly growing its base of business users. Adoption increased to 11.1%, up 1.5% from June.
OpenAI remains the leader in business adoption, at 35.1%, up 1.7% from June).

An update to our methodology

Last month, we reported that AI adoption among businesses fell 0.5%. The decrease was small compared to the tremendous growth in adoption we’ve seen in 2025, but it was a surprise slowdown in a rapidly growing industry (we noted that overall spend continued to increase despite the slowdown in business adoption).

This week, we updated the model behind Ramp AI Index to more accurately capture outlier categories of AI spend. Our updated model better captures certain API spend and new subscription offerings introduced since our previous model update. These changes moderated the size of the decline.

We look at the broader implications of softening AI adoption in our Q2 spending report.

→ Download the Summer 2025 Ramp Business Spending Report

For more analysis of Ramp spend data, follow me on X and LinkedIn, and check out Ramp Economics Lab. All data is available for download from Ramp AI Index.

Ara Kharazian•Economist, Ramp

Ara Kharazian is an economist at Ramp. His writing and analysis of AI, business spend, and the economy has been covered in the New York Times, NBC News, ABC News, NPR's Planet Money, Bloomberg, the Guardian, Vox, Axios, and more. Ara previously led economic research at Square and developed Square Payroll Index, which became one of the key public datasets used to track restaurant worker wages, tips, and overtime in the United States. He was previously an economic consultant at Cornerstone Research.

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