In its October 2026 report, the
@AtlantaFed says US companies spend about $1,024 per employee per year on AI. But if we look at their May post, the very same survey shows $2,068.
I think we can be fairly confident that both numbers are right. The only difference is how many of the biggest spenders you count. Cut the top 5%, and the average falls by half. A small number of companies account for almost all the spending, while the rest simply buy a few subscriptions.
$1,024 a year is roughly one ChatGPT license + one Copilot, and that’s it. No agents, no API, no premium tools. If we look at
@tryramp card data, we see the same picture: the median company spends $190 a year, the top 1% spend $115k.
So while headlines like “AI spending has doubled” are just words, in reality for most companies it doubled to the price of two basic subscriptions.
The ones actually paying for the data centres sit 600x to the right of the median firm.