The AI Spending Gap: Top AI-Spending Firms Pay About $7,500 per Employee, While the Median Is Just $11.38
June 11, 2026
How much are companies actually spending on AI?
According to data from the fintech company Ramp, firms in the top 1% by per-employee AI spend now pay about $7,500 per worker each month.
The median firm spends just $11.38, showing how unevenly paid AI spending is distributed across businesses.
Three Tiers of Spending and What the Numbers Cover
The Ramp AI Index measures paid AI use among US businesses using spending data from Ramp’s corporate card and bill-pay platform. The latest update shows a wide gap between firms by per-employee AI spend.
The top 1% — which Ramp calls “AI-pilled” — spend about $7,500 a month per employee, or $7,449 based on Ramp’s published figure.
This figure is not what each worker personally pays; it is a company’s total AI spend divided by its headcount, expressed on a per-employee basis. Normalizing per employee makes it easier to compare firms of different sizes and to put AI spend in the context of labor costs.
The top 10% spend about $611, and the median just $11.38, close to the cost of a single AI subscription seat. Based on the official figures, the gap between the top 1% and the median is about 650 times.
One caveat matters: these numbers reflect only spending Ramp can see. Because Ramp measures corporate-card and invoice-based payments, free AI tools and AI used through employees’ personal accounts may not be captured, so the data shows paid corporate AI spending rather than the full picture of US AI adoption.
AI Costs Are Rising, but Payroll Still Sets the Benchmark
The numbers raise a pointed question: are firms starting to spend more on AI than on their workers?
Bryan Catanzaro, an Nvidia executive, reportedly said that on his own team the cost of compute now exceeds the cost of employees, and the CEO of Mercor, an AI startup, said the company spends more on tokens for its internal agents than on employee salaries.
But Ramp’s data suggests that, across firms, the answer for now is no. TechCrunch cites a benchmark of about $16,000 a month for a US software engineer; the roughly $7,500 a month that top-1% firms reportedly spend per employee on AI falls short of that.
What the Spending Gap Says About a Two-Speed Rollout
What stands out is that spending is still rising, at least recently. Among AI-pilled firms, per-employee AI spend grew 14.1% in the past month. These firms tend to mix and match, moving between multiple frontier models and cheaper open-source options depending on the task.
Compared with a median firm spending just $11.38 per employee, the data points to a sharply two-speed rollout: a small group experimenting at scale while most companies have yet to commit real budget to paid AI.
What to Watch Next
AI-pilled firms grew their per-employee AI spend 14.1% in a single month, but it is not yet clear whether that pace will hold. As companies blend frontier and lower-cost open-source models, the open question is whether the wide spending gap across firms narrows or widens — a key signal for the next phase of AI adoption.
Sources
Ramp Economics Lab – How much does it cost to be AI-pilled?
TechCrunch – ‘AI-pilled’ firms spend $7,500 per employee each month on AI
The Next Web – The most AI-obsessed companies spend $7,500 per employee per month
Fortune – Nvidia executive says compute costs exceed employee costs
Business Insider – Mercor’s CEO says it now spends more on AI tokens than employee salaries
