Companies are using more AI than ever, but paying less for it, Ramp economist says

Your index at RAMP went from 100 in January to more than 1,200 about 10 months later. So explain that pretty steep incline to us. For the last two years that we've been tracking AI's proliferation through the economy, it has been the fastest growing spend category we've ever tracked. In large part, that's because AI is this technology that has been transformational in certain sectors. Its adoption has proliferated across the economy. And it's also extremely expensive, so its spend has kind of spiraled out of control. What's happened uniquely uniquely over the last couple months is that volumes of AI token usage have continued to rise. But AI spend itself is starting to slow. So there's a couple of things going on that might drive that kind of dynamic. One, AI is becoming much more common in the workplace. It's being deployed by organizations across the Fortune 500 and very high intensity tech companies. At the same time, it's getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, and that ultimately poses a threat to the model companies that need to profit off this technology so they can reinvest in data centers and continue to grow their market share. That ends up being one of the causes of hysteria in the markets lately is who's going to win from... the AI trade. It still remains to be seen whether or not that kind of adoption will be able to proliferate or even make sense to proliferate outside the tech sector.