Financial services company Ramp reported on 11 November how AI payments by its business customers changed in October. The Decoder and The Neuron covered the figures. The Ramp AI Index tracks payments by more than 85,000 US business customers, and Ramp’s lead economist Ara Kharazian analyses the figures. Spending rose 1.65 per cent from September, The Decoder reported.

Spending concentrated among a few

Among companies paying for AI, median spending in October was $16.32 per employee per month, 93 cents more than in September, according to Ramp’s page. For the top 1 per cent of spenders, the median was $10,199.20, about 9 per cent more than in September.

Kharazian said 1 per cent of companies drive 80 per cent of revenue for OpenAI and Anthropic. The Neuron added that the figure refers to revenue visible in Ramp’s data. The top group consists mostly of venture-backed technology, finance and technical services companies, The Decoder reported.

In October, 56.8 per cent of Ramp’s business customers paid for some AI service, 1 percentage point more than in September. The share paying Anthropic was 44.8 per cent and the share paying OpenAI 40.6 per cent; a company can pay both. Payments to OpenAI grew 2.1 per cent in the month and payments to Anthropic 0.5 per cent, The Decoder reported.

Estimates of sample bias point in opposite directions. The Decoder said the figures probably overstate adoption, because Ramp’s customers are larger, more tech-friendly and more growth-oriented than average. Ramp itself estimates that its figures are likely too low, because free tools and work done on personal accounts do not show up in payments.

Token prices fall

Language models process text as tokens, or parts of words, and companies that use models through an API usually pay for the tokens they use. The average price per million text tokens fell 21 per cent over the previous month, The Decoder reported. Ramp’s page shows the blended OpenAI and Anthropic price falling 14.8 per cent, from $0.62 in the week ending 4 October to $0.53 in the week ending 1 November. The sources do not explain the difference.

Over the same period, the number of tokens processed rose 29 per cent and the money spent on them 10.5 per cent. The token figures come only from users of Ramp’s Token Spend Management service. Ramp said they do not represent AI spending by all its customers, although the trend is similar. In The Decoder’s assessment, competition between OpenAI and Anthropic and Chinese open-weight models are pushing prices down.

Customer support gains share

Software development teams accounted for 72 per cent of AI spending classified by department in October, but their spending has fallen from its summer peak. The share of customer support and customer success rose from 0.8 per cent in June to 13.3 per cent. Kharazian suspects customer service chatbots are behind the rise. The Neuron noted, however, that payment data does not show which applications drive the growth.

The Decoder said such users prefer cheaper and faster models, so OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s margins on new customers may be lower. Even so, the most expensive models’ share of spending edged up in October to 69.5 per cent. Kharazian counts Opus, Fable, Sol and Astra among them.