Top 1% of Firms Cut AI Spend per Employee 10% to $7,205 as Token Prices Fall
Updated
Updated · TechCrunch · Sep 9
Top 1% of Firms Cut AI Spend per Employee 10% to $7,205 as Token Prices Fall
3 articles · Updated · TechCrunch · Sep 9
Summary
Ramp data from 70,000 companies showed AI spend per employee at the top 1% of firms fell nearly 10% in August to $7,205, a fresh warning sign for labs counting on enterprise demand.
OpenAI and Anthropic price cuts helped drive average token costs down to $0.68 per million from a 2026 peak of $1.15 in March, and Ramp said higher usage has not yet offset the cheaper pricing.
Business adoption also cooled: 56% of Ramp customers paid for AI tools in August, up just 0.4 percentage point from July, though summer vacations may have contributed to the lull.
The slowdown matters because frontier labs and hyperscalers are funding massive AI infrastructure on expectations of fast revenue growth, even as many customers shift to older, cheaper models.
Open-weight competition still looks limited in this data set, with only 6.4% of AI-spending businesses using model-serving or inference platforms in August.