Corporate America’s Top 1% Spend $7,400 Per Employee on AI

Corporate America's Top 1% Devote $7,400 per Employee to AI

The top 1% of U.S. businesses spent a median of $7,400 per employee on artificial intelligence in July, according to the Ramp AI Index released on August 12. This expenditure represents more than 600 times the median $11.95 per employee spent by all businesses. The gap between the heaviest spenders and typical businesses is staggering.

Anthropic leads the AI adoption race, with 43.5% of U.S. businesses utilizing its subscriptions or tokens in July, a 1.1 percentage point increase from the previous month. OpenAI follows with a modest 0.23 percentage point growth, while xAI's rapid adoption brought it to 4% of businesses. However, businesses face a ceiling on how much they are willing to pay for the best-performing AI models.

Anthropic's latest model, Fable 5, priced at $10 per million tokens, captured only 6% of the tokens and 11.4% of the dollars spent from businesses, despite being marketed as the superior model. OpenAI's more affordable GPT-5.6 Sol, priced at half of Fable 5's rate, dominated OpenAI's spending, capturing 25% of tokens and 23% of total spend.

Cheaper alternatives, including model-serving platforms offering open-source and Chinese-developed models, are gaining traction, reaching 6.1% of AI-adopting businesses, up 0.2 percentage points from the previous month. Despite the growing adoption of cheaper alternatives, executives remain optimistic about the return on investment in AI.

The share of CFOs expecting very positive returns within one to two years has increased from zero to 39.1%. However, internal factors, such as organizational readiness, continue to hinder performance for many companies. Only 2% of S&P 500 companies have quantified the effects of AI in their earnings reports, but those that have seen a 17% median earnings increase compared to 14% for those that did not.

The early movers are already reaping the benefits, signaling that corporate AI adoption is running at two speeds - a small group of heavy spenders and the rest adopting more cautiously.