The top 1% of firms spend $7.45K per employee per month. The top 10% spend $611 per employee per month. The median firm spends just $11.38 – about the cost of a seat on an enterprise ChatGPT or Claude subscription.

And while several high-profile proclamations have said you should be spending as much on AI as you do on a software engineer’s salary…no one is actually doing that. For the top 1% of spenders, per employee AI spend is still less than half the typical monthly salary for an engineer. Not to say that won’t change – AI spend is still rising – but very few firms, if any, are actually doing that.

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The top 1% of firms grew spend per employee 14.1% last month. That said, we previously found evidence firms are increasingly opting for cheaper AI models, including ones from DeepSeek, the Chinese competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic. So while firms are applying cost discipline on the margin, that’s a function of total spend rising, and rising faster than firms’ willingness to switch to cheaper solutions.