AI spend per employee slumped at top firms in August — summer doldrums or a warning sign?

Ramp’s August data on 70,000 firms shows AI product payments slipping to 56% of customers, a 0.4% rise from July, while spend per employee among the top 1% of AI-using firms fell nearly 10% to $7,205. Token costs dropped to $0.68 per million after OpenAI and Anthropic price cuts, prompting many users to shift to older, cheaper models and keeping model-serving platform adoption at just 6.4%.