LinkedIn·Monday, 17 August 2026·9d ago

FASCINATING. Ramp's AI index reveals exactly how top 1% companies use AI. How much they spend per employee, what models they use: 1. 680x…

Assem Chammah

CEO @ Nexus | AI transformation for enterprises | Clients inc. Orange Group & Lambda

FASCINATING. Ramp's AI index reveals exactly how top 1% companies use AI. How much they spend per employee, what models they use: 1. 680x gap between top 1% and median - Median company spends $11.38 per employee per month. - Top 10% spend $611 per employee per month. - Top 1% spend $7,449 per employee per month. 2. They run several models at once - Ramp profiled the top 1% as multi-model, open-source serving platforms, multi-vendor, no lock-in. 3. Agents built for one workflow - $11.38 a month buys one chat seat. That is the entire median AI strategy. - The top 1% buy verticalized AI. Voice agents, software that does a job end to end. 4. Top 1% spend less than half an engineer - $7,449 a month is roughly $90k a year per employee. - Ramp notes that very few firms, if any, spend as much on AI as they spend on engineer salaries. - If you are paying a million dollars in tokens, you have a good problem. 5. Heavy adopters grew headcount - +10.2% headcount over two years. +12% entry-level hiring. - 21,599 companies, card data matched against workforce records. Low-intensity adopters showed no significant change. 6. Anthropic passed OpenAI - 50.4% of US businesses now pay for AI. - Anthropic sits at 43.5%. OpenAI at 39.7%. - Anthropic's share of paid AI customers went from 16.7% to 30.6% in a quarter. My read: - Top 1% have infrastructure to use any model. This is incredibly important as this layer is commoditized. - Top 1% are accelerating AI usage (14.1% MoM), meaning the gap between median and top 1% will continue to grow.