Ramp AI Index: business token volume grew 37.1% while AI spending rose 8.9%

Token usage is racing ahead of spend

Ramp's AI Index recorded a 37.1 percent increase in total business AI token volume in the week ending October 23, 2026, compared with the week ending September 25, 2026. Over the same period, total token spending rose just 8.9 percent. The index is built from card, invoice and ACH transaction data covering more than 85,000 US businesses, and the latest figures were covered on November 6, 2026 by Benzinga, Unite.AI and TechCrunch, according to a dev.to summary of the release.

Falling unit prices explain the gap

The divergence between what businesses consume and what they pay comes down to price. According to Ramp, the blended price per million tokens across OpenAI and Anthropic fell from $0.76 to $0.56 over the measured period, a drop of 26.8 percent. The decline was uneven between the two vendors: OpenAI's effective price fell 42.4 percent, while Anthropic's fell 15.7 percent.

TechCrunch reported that OpenAI halved API prices for GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna in September, and that Anthropic made significant reductions for Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5. Anthropic said in a filing that the decision cut its revenue growth by roughly $600 million, a concrete example of providers trading revenue for volume.

The effect shows up directly in the spending curve. Ramp found token spend grew only 1.5 percent across August and September, down sharply from 42 percent growth in July, and that token expenditure was essentially flat for two consecutive months.

Adoption keeps climbing

While spending has plateaued, adoption has not. In September 2026, AI adoption reached 55.9 percent of the businesses Ramp tracks, up 0.6 percentage points from August and 12.1 points from a year earlier. Ramp economist Ara Kharazian said in October that the spending slowdown is not a demand problem, since AI volumes are rising, and pointed to price competition among providers instead.

Ramp also cautions that its adoption figure is likely understated, because free AI tools and personal accounts used for work do not appear in transaction data.

Anthropic leads business token spend

In the week ending October 23, 2026, Anthropic held 60.5 percent of business token spending, with OpenAI at 35.1 percent. By adoption in September, 43.8 percent of tracked businesses paid Anthropic and 40.6 percent paid OpenAI.

Spending is also heavily concentrated. Among firms paying for AI, the median firm spends $15.70 per employee per month, while the top 10 percent spend $813.43 and the top 1 percent spend $9,567.53 per employee per month. Ramp states that 1 percent of firms drives roughly 80 percent of all spending on OpenAI and Anthropic combined.

Why it matters

Flat revenue is often read as weak demand, but Ramp's data suggests the opposite is happening in business AI: usage is growing roughly four times faster than spend because each token is getting dramatically cheaper. That carries several consequences. Model providers face a structural squeeze in which volume growth must outpace price declines just to keep revenue level, as Anthropic's $600 million revenue-growth reduction illustrates. For buyers, the same budget now buys far more capability, which could accelerate the embedding of AI into ordinary business software rather than remaining a separate line item. And anyone tracking the AI market through spending data alone risks mistaking deflation for stagnation, a distinction Ramp explores in its "Cracks in the AI Thesis" analysis series, whose third installment is dated October 14, 2026.