Nvidia executives recently said that the cost of computing is now higher than employee salaries. Melkor’s CEO said last week that the company is spending more on tokens for its internal agents than on the number of employees.
As companies burn through their token budgets, the big question is: Are companies actually spending more on AI than on humans?
It’s not quite there yet, according to the latest research from the Ramp AI Index, which measures the rate of AI adoption in U.S. companies. The top 1% of companies, which Lamp describes as “AI-immersed,” spend $7,500 per employee per month. Whether you consider this a lot or a little depends on your point of view, but it certainly doesn’t exceed the average software engineer’s monthly salary of about $16,000.
And those are just power users. The top 10% spend about $611 per employee per month, with a median of about $11.38, or just the cost of a seat in an Enterprise plan.
However, despite the pressure, spending on AI is still increasing. Companies that implemented AI saw a 14.1% increase in spending per employee last month. It is not yet clear whether this trend will continue. The top 1% of companies tend to use a combination of multiple frontier models, choosing to move between platforms that give them access to cheaper open source models.
