Business spending on AI reached a new high in October, but it grew slowly, according to the November 2026 Ramp AI Index. Ramp lead economist Ara Kharazian published the update on Nov. 11. He writes that AI spending rose 1.65% from September.
The index uses card and bill-pay data from Ramp, a financial technology company. Ramp says the sample covers more than 85,000 US businesses. This month, Ramp also added a new view: AI spend by department. That view shows which teams in a company pay for AI.
How much businesses spent on AI in October
Ramp splits companies into groups by how much they spend. Its figures for October:
- The top 1% of firms spend a median $10.2K per employee per month on AI, up 9%, Ramp says.
- Firms in the top 10% spent $801 per employee, which Ramp calls "roughly flat."
- The median firm spends $16.32 per employee, up $0.93.
AI token spend grew 2.1% month over month for OpenAI and 0.5% for Anthropic, according to the index.
Kharazian writes that the risks from his earlier "Cracks in the AI Thesis" series remain. In his words: "AI spend is highly concentrated. 1% of businesses drive 80% of the revenues to OpenAI and Anthropic." He adds that this top 1% is largely made up of VC-backed companies in tech, finance, and technical services.
He also lists three other points:
- Growth in the median and top 10% groups is "relatively sluggish."
- "Prices for AI models continue to fall. The average price per million tokens fell 21% over the last month." He writes that token volume growth continues to outpace token spend "as AI gets cheaper and cheaper."
- "Most importantly, spend by engineering teams, which remains the largest enterprise AI spend category, stutters along, despite rising usage."
Engineering still leads, support teams grow
Ramp says the new metric lets it track which teams are driving net-new spend. In October, engineering teams drove 72% of all classified spend, Ramp says. But that spend has fallen from highs Ramp observed earlier this summer.
Kharazian writes that customer success and support operations, "possibly deploying models for customer service chatbots," are driving a modest reacceleration in AI spend. Those teams drove 13.3% of classified spend in October, up from 0.8% in June. He also sees modest growth in AI spend by executive leadership teams.
He adds a limit. Spending by customer service departments "has not reached the kind of hypergrowth we saw with engineering early this year." He writes that it is not clear whether this use alone can drive outsized gains to OpenAI and Anthropic.
His reason: support work is a good candidate for cheaper and faster models, not the highest-margin and highest-performance models. He names Opus, Fable, Sol and Astra as those top models. For now, those frontier models' share of spend is up slightly, Ramp says, to 69.5% in October from 67.7%. For more on one of those model lines, see our post on Claude Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 prices and scores.
Ramp says department-level data will soon be on its weekly AI Index dashboard.
SpaceXAI gains in business adoption
The second "new front" in the letter is adoption, meaning the share of Ramp businesses that paid a given AI company in a month.
Ramp's October figures:
- 6.3% of Ramp businesses paid SpaceXAI, up 2.2 percentage points from the month before.
- Anthropic adoption rose 1.1 points to 44.8%.
- OpenAI adoption held flat at 40.6%.
- Overall adoption reached 56.8%, up 1 point. Ramp says that is slightly faster than September's 0.66 point gain.
Kharazian writes that SpaceXAI "led breakout growth in business AI adoption" in October. He writes that Ramp recently shared that SpaceXAI "is the fastest growing software company in Ramp's entire dataset." He writes: "Expect this two-way race to quickly turn into a 3-way race that puts greater price pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic."
That forecast is his view, based on Ramp's data. Anthropic's own business is in the news this week too: see our post on Anthropic's IPO price range.
Weekly token data
The main Ramp AI Index page also has weekly token data. In the week ending Nov. 1, Anthropic had 49.3% of AI token spending among businesses on Ramp, Ramp says. Total token spending rose 10.5% compared with the same week last month.
Ramp says these token figures come from a smaller group of businesses that use its Token Spend Management product. It says that group "is not representative of Ramp's total AI spend volume, though results are directionally similar."
How Ramp measures this
Ramp counts a business as an AI adopter when it sees a payment for an AI product or service in a given month. Because of this, Ramp says its numbers likely miss some use: "It's likely our results underestimate actual AI adoption and spend due to the prevalence of businesses using free AI tools, in which no paid transaction occurs, or when employees use personal accounts with AI companies to complete work tasks."
The data covers US businesses on Ramp only.
Sources
- November 2026 Ramp AI Index: New Fronts in the AI Trade, Ara Kharazian, Ramp, Nov. 11, 2026
- Ramp AI Index, Ramp, data through October 2026
