AI usage keeps climbing. Company spend has stopped.

WHAT HAPPENED

Ramp: token volumes rose while AI spend flatlined

A new Ramp report shows AI spending flatlined over late summer even as token volumes rose. Price cuts from OpenAI and Anthropic, plus customers getting savvier about controlling costs, are part of the explanation.

THE NUMBER

1.5%

Token spend growth across August and September

In July, spend had grown 42% from the previous month.

THE REAL PROBLEM IN COMPANIES

What I see in companies: usage gets counted, value does not

1. 01Teams track logins and tokens, not whether a workflow got better
2. 02Budget is approved for the tool, not for a specific use case
3. 03Nobody owns the question: is this use case worth what it costs?

I'VE ALREADY SOLVED THIS

AskMoses.AI, the SaaS I built end to end and run as a contractor

1. 0117 organizations in the US signed up. Only 6 actually use it.
2. 0211 of 17 never activated: onboarding required a CRM and a rubric first.
3. 0388% gross margin, plus Script Intelligence: a weekly script from winning calls.

MY TAKE

Launching is not the same as being used.

Rising usage with flat spend suggests some companies are measuring what AI delivers. In practice, that means tracking adoption and results per use case before scaling the budget. Usage alone is not value.