$7,500 per employee per month. That's what the top 1% of American companies — what Ramp calls "AI-pilled" firms — are spending on AI compute and tokens. An Nvidia executive recently said compute costs have surpassed employee salaries at his company. Mercor's CEO told a similar story: the startup now spends more on tokens for internal agents than on human headcount.
The Median Firm Spends $11.38 per Employee
Ramp's AI Index, which tracks AI adoption across U.S. businesses, reveals a staggering gap between power users and the rest. The top 10% of firms spend $611 per employee per month. The median company? $11.38 — roughly the cost of a single enterprise SaaS seat. That means the top 1% outspend the median by over 650 times. AI spending is highly concentrated, not yet a universal line item.
Compute Costs Are Outpacing Salaries for Power Users
Even at $7,500 per employee, these AI-pilled firms still spend less than the average software engineer's monthly salary of about $16,000. But the trend is accelerating. Among the top 1%, AI spending grew 14.1% per employee last month alone. If that rate holds, they'll cross the salary threshold within months. The top firms aren't married to a single model — they bounce between frontier models and cheaper open-source alternatives to keep costs in check.
Whether the 14.1% monthly growth holds depends entirely on whether those firms see proportional returns. For now, inference cost is becoming a line item that rivals rent, and the median company hasn't even started.
Source: 'AI-pilled' firms spend $7,500 per employee each month on AI
Domain: techcrunch.com
Comments load interactively on the live page.