Ramp Reports 10% Drop in AI Spending Among Top Businesses in August 2026

The companies that were spending the most on AI just took their foot off the gas. Ramp’s September 2026 AI Index shows that median AI expenditure among the top 1% of spenders on its platform fell nearly 10% in a single month, dropping from roughly $7,976 per employee in July to $7,205 per employee in August.

The data, drawn from transaction records across more than 70,000 US businesses, paints a more nuanced picture than the usual “AI spending is exploding” narrative. Adoption keeps climbing, but the biggest checks are getting smaller.

Paid AI adoption among Ramp’s customer base ticked up by 0.4 percentage points in August, reaching 56%. The top 1% of AI-spending firms were shelling out more than $7,200 per employee per month. To put that in perspective, the median corporate AI spend across all Ramp customers is approximately $12 per employee per month.

That 10% month-over-month decline among elite spenders could reflect several dynamics. Lead economist Ara Kharazian pointed to seasonal factors like summer vacations, which tend to suppress corporate activity generally. But he also flagged something more structural: prices are falling fast.

Average effective token prices dropped to $0.68 per million tokens in early September, down from $1.15 per million in March. That’s a 41% decline in roughly six months.

Anthropic appears to be winning the business adoption race, at least on Ramp’s platform. It captured 43.8% of business adoption share in August, compared to OpenAI’s 39.8%.

A 41% drop in token prices means the same compute budget stretches a lot further. Companies that were spending $8,000 per employee might now get equivalent capability for $7,200 simply because the underlying infrastructure got cheaper.

For the broader economy, the continued spread of paid AI adoption—now at 56% of Ramp’s customer base—signals that AI tools are becoming standard business software. The median spend of roughly $12 per employee per month puts AI in the same budget category as many SaaS subscriptions.