Top 1% of firms spend $7.5k per employee on AI but still trail human salaries

new data from the ramp ai index reveals that the top 1% of 'ai-pilled' companies are spending $7,500 per employee per month on ai infrastructure, nearly matching half the cost of an average software engineer's salary. this elite cohort is increasing spend by 14.1% monthly, often mixing frontier models with cheaper open-source options to optimize costs. in contrast, the top 10% spend only $611 monthly per employee, while the median spend sits at $11.38. the findings indicate a bifurcation in enterprise ai adoption, where leaders are pouring capital into agents and tokens while most companies remain minimal users.