AI spend per employee slumped at top firms in August — summer doldrums or a warning sign?

image via TechCrunch

September 9, 2026, 2:18 PM

• •Ramp’s dataset of 70,000 companies found that 56% of its customers paid for AI tools in August, only slightly above July.
• •Ramp economist Ara Kharazian said AI spend per employee among the top 1% of AI-using firms fell nearly 10% to $7,205.
• •Average token costs dropped to $0.68 per million tokens, down from a 2026 peak of $1.15 per million in March.
• •The article says customers are often choosing older, cheaper models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5.6-Terra and Anthropic’s Sonnet instead of newer frontier releases.
• •Only 6.4% of AI-spending businesses used model-serving or inference platforms in August, suggesting open-weight alternatives remain a small share of business use.

Ramp says 56% of its customers paid for AI products in August, up just 0.4 percentage points from July, indicating slower business adoption. The article says this may partly reflect seasonal vacation slowdowns, but it also highlights falling token prices and a nearly 10% drop in AI spend per employee among the top 1% of AI-using firms in Ramp’s sample. Average token costs fell to $0.68 per million tokens from a 2026 peak of $1.15 in March, while customers also shifted toward older and cheaper models from OpenAI and Anthropic. The piece argues that slower spending growth could matter for frontier labs and hyperscalers counting on strong AI revenue, even as lower prices benefit businesses using the tools.

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