The adoption of AI tools by businesses experienced a slowdown in August, according to spending data from 70,000 companies collected by payments company Ramp. The latest survey indicates that 56% of Ramp customers paid for AI products in August, representing a modest 0.4% increase from the previous month.
A significant factor in this trend is a nearly 10% decline in AI spend per employee at the top 1% of firms in Ramp's sample, falling to $7,205. This may be partly attributed to the industry's vacation period in August, but also reflects falling token costs.
Average token costs have decreased to $0.68 per million tokens in August, down from a peak of $1.15 per million tokens in March 2026. This reduction follows price cuts by companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, with some customers opting for older, cheaper models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5.6-Terra and Anthropic’s Sonnet.
Ramp economist Ara Kharazian noted that competition between OpenAI and Anthropic is making AI more accessible and driving down prices for companies. He added that this is also reducing spend at the top 1% of companies that were previously expected to drive much of the growth.