AI spending at top firms slipped in August as token prices keep falling

Payments company Ramp tracks what its 70,000 business customers actually spend, which makes its monthly read on AI a useful check against the hype. In August the numbers cooled. TechCrunch reports that adoption rose just 0.4 percent month over month, and among the heaviest 1 percent of AI users, spend per employee dropped nearly 10 percent to $7,205. Some 56 percent of surveyed companies bought AI products during the month, but the growth that carried the past year seems to have stalled.

Part of the story is simply falling prices. The cost of a million tokens has dropped from a March peak of $1.15 to $0.68, so companies can do the same work for less. That is good for buyers and awkward for sellers. The infrastructure bets behind this boom assume revenue keeps climbing, yet price competition between OpenAI and Anthropic is cutting per-token cost faster than usage is rising to compensate. Whether August was a summer lull or an early warning is the open question, especially against Census data showing only 22 percent of all US businesses use AI at all.

Why it matters

If you sell AI products or plan capacity around them, one soft month is not a trend, but the gap between falling prices and flat volume is the exact squeeze that could break the economics. If you buy AI, the same price drop is a reason to renegotiate contracts now.