What changed
US corporate AI spending rose 1.65 percent month over month in October 2026 to a new high, according to the Ramp AI Index.
The top one percent of companies by AI spending paid a median of $10,200 per employee per month, up nine percent, while the typical company spent $16.32, a slight increase of less than a dollar from the previous month.
Software development teams accounted for 72 percent of all tracked AI spending.
What this means in practice
The Ramp AI Index tracks AI spending among business customers of financial services provider Ramp. The data reflects market trends but is not necessarily representative of the broader US business landscape.
Ramp's data draws on payment data from more than 85,000 US companies, though free AI tools and usage through personal accounts may be missing from the figures.
The customer base skews growth-oriented, tech-savvy, and larger than US businesses overall, so AI adoption is likely overstated.
Business customers' spending on OpenAI grew 2.1 percent month over month, compared with just 0.5 percent for Anthropic.
The average price per million processed text tokens dropped 21 percent last month, driven by competitive pressure between OpenAI and Anthropic along with open-weight models from China.
Customer support and customer success departments saw the strongest growth in AI spending, with their share of AI spending climbing from 0.8 percent in June to 13.3 percent in October, possibly driven by AI chatbots in customer service.
Limitations and availability
Ramp's data on token volume and spending comes only from companies using Ramp Token Spend Management and isn't representative of overall AI spending on the platform.
The share of the most expensive models, which includes Opus, Fable, Sol, and Astra, reached 69.5 percent of total spending in October. One percent of companies still drive 80 percent of revenue for OpenAI and Anthropic, according to Ramp.
The supplied announcement does not specify the exact conditions under which the data was collected or the full scope of AI adoption across all sectors.
