Ramp's September 2026 AI Index, based on transaction records from over 70,000 US businesses, reveals a shift in corporate AI spending. While overall adoption is rising, the top 1% of spenders saw their median expenditure drop by nearly 10% in August, falling from approximately $7,976 per employee in July to $7,205 per employee.
Across the entire Ramp customer base, paid AI adoption increased by 0.4 percentage points in August, reaching 56%. The median corporate AI spend for all customers is approximately $12 per employee per month, placing AI tools in a similar budget category as standard SaaS subscriptions.
Lead economist Ara Kharazian attributes the spending decline among elite spenders to seasonal factors such as summer vacations and a structural drop in costs. Average effective token prices fell 41% in roughly six months, dropping from $1.15 per million tokens in March to $0.68 per million tokens in early September.
In terms of market share on the Ramp platform, Anthropic led business adoption in August with a 43.8% share, surpassing OpenAI, which held 39.8%.