According to the Ramp AI Index, as of September 2026, more than half of all businesses paid for an artificial intelligence (AI) product or service. Adoption rates jumped in the months after ChatGPT’s public launch in late 2022 and have risen steadily since.
The data
Ramp calculates the adoption index by using firms’ corporate spending on services from AI companies to estimate adoption rates overall and by provider, industry, and company size. FRED recently added 14 data series from this source.
Some insights
Adoption by business size: AI adoption has climbed for businesses of every size, although it is spreading fastest at bigger and medium-sized companies. Adoption among small-sized businesses has grown steadily, but they lag the other two groups.
Adoption by industry: Industry matters much more than size. The information sector, which includes software and publishing, has consistently recorded the highest adoption rates since 2023, with finance and insurance close behind. Other industries, in decreasing order of AI adoption are manufacturing, retail trade, health care and social assistance, construction, and accommodation and food services.
Adoption by provider: A business can pay for AI products and services offered by more than one provider, so the adoption shares reported by Ramp don’t match the overall adoption rate. OpenAI surged in the first months of 2023 and kept rising through most of 2025, but it has leveled off since then. Anthropic gained ground steadily from 2024 on. Its growth accelerated sharply in early 2026, and at the time of this writing it has become the most widely paid-for of the providers tracked. A third provider, xAI, remains much smaller.
Some caveats
These data series don’t reflect employees using free AI tools (such as Google’s Gemini), AI features built into other software, or the intensity of use of those tools and features (which is measured by spending on tokens). Details about how closely the Ramp index reflects business practices across the US can be obtained by examining the notes provided under the FRED graphs.
How this graph was created: Search FRED for and select “Artificial Intelligence Adoption by Ramp Businesses: Overall.” Click the “Edit Graph” button and select the “Add Line” tab to search for “Artificial Intelligence Adoption by Ramp Businesses: Company Size: Large Businesses.” Don’t forget to click “Add data series.” Repeat this last step to search for and add the other two series: “Artificial Intelligence Adoption by Ramp Businesses: Company Size: Medium-Sized Businesses” and “Artificial Intelligence Adoption by Ramp Businesses: Company Size: Small-Sized Businesses.”
Suggested by Diego Mendez-Carbajo.