TL;DRRamp data: top 1% of firms spend $7,500/employee/month on AI. Top 10% spend $611. The median? $11.38. Spend among power users grew 14.1% last month.
The top 1% of US companies by AI adoption spend $7,500 per employee per month on AI tools and compute. The median firm spends $11.38. That 680x gap, drawn from the Ramp AI Index, is the clearest picture yet of how unevenly AI spending is distributed across American business.
Ramp describes the top 1% as “AI-pilled.” These firms are not yet spending more on AI than on people. A software engineer in the US earns roughly $16,000 per month, more than double the $7,500 figure. But the trajectory is steep. Among the top 1%, AI spend per employee grew 14.1% in the last month alone.
The top 10% of firms spend about $611 monthly per employee. That is roughly the cost of a few enterprise AI seats plus some API usage. The median, $11.38, is basically one subscription. For the vast majority of companies, AI spending is still a rounding error on their software budgets.
The data lands alongside growing anecdotes from the extreme end. An Nvidia executive recently said the cost of compute now exceeds the salaries of his employees. Mercor’s CEO said the startup spends more on tokens for internal agents than on headcount. Enterprise AI bills have tripled despite a 98% drop in per-token prices, because agentic tools drive consumption 18.6 times higher per developer.
