Companies with the largest AI investments spend up to $7,500 per employee

Companies that most actively implement artificial intelligence spend an average of $7,500 per month on it.

This is reported by TechCrunch.

At the same time, these expenses are still lower than the average salary of a software engineer.

How AI spending compares to personnel costs

According to the publication, NVIDIA’s Vice President of Applied Deep Learning, Brayan Katandzaro, says that compute costs now exceed his employees’ salaries.

Also last week the CEO of startup Mercor said the company spends more money on tokens for internal AI agents than on employee salaries.

Against this backdrop, researchers at the Ramp AI Index analyzed the level of AI adoption among American companies and estimated their spending on related services.

More on the study’s findings

The top 1% of companies by AI spending spend an average of $7,500 per employee per month.

At the same time, this amount still remains below the average monthly salary of a software engineer, which is around $16,000.

Among companies in the top 10% by AI spending, average costs are $611 per employee per month.

For the other companies included in the study, median spending is only $11.38 per employee — roughly the price of a seat on a corporate plan for AI services.

Despite this, AI spending continues to rise. In the group of highest-spending companies, this metric increased by 14.1% month over month on a per-employee basis.

TechCrunch writes that the highest-spending companies typically use multiple different AI models and platforms simultaneously, combining advanced commercial solutions with cheaper open-source models.

Recall, Anthropic says that AI developers should pre-agree on a mechanism to slow down or temporarily halt the development of AI systems. This would be necessary if they start improving themselves faster than society can control them.

Anthropic warns that the emergence of systems capable of autonomously creating their own improved versions could become one of the most important technological breakthroughs in history.

At the same time, such capability could increase the risk of humans losing control over artificial intelligence.

Read also: “Humanity needs to prepare for a ‘new era’.” What the head of Google DeepMind thinks about the new generation of AI?