AI adoption hits 50%
A March index reports that roughly half of businesses have adopted AI, marking a shift from early trials to mainstream use. The Ramp AI Index suggests this move changes buyer priorities from model selection to deployment, governance and vendor choice. (markets.financialcontent.com)
Half of U.S. businesses on Ramp paid for artificial intelligence tools in March, the first time the share has crossed 50%, according to Ramp’s latest monthly index. (ramp.com) Ramp said the adoption rate reached 50.4% in March, up from 47.6% in February and 35% a year earlier. The index is based on corporate card and bill-pay data from more than 50,000 American businesses on Ramp’s platform. (ramp.com 1) (ramp.com 2) Ramp counts a business as an adopter when it records a paid transaction for an artificial intelligence product or service in a given month. The company said that method likely understates use because free tools and employee purchases on personal accounts do not show up in its payment data. (ramp.com) That distinction helps explain why a payments index can show 50.4% while broader surveys show much higher use. McKinsey said in its 2025 global survey that nearly nine in ten respondents reported their organizations were regularly using artificial intelligence, but most had not embedded it deeply enough to produce enterprise-wide impact. (mckinsey.com) The shift in paid adoption has also changed the vendor race. Ramp said OpenAI still led in March at 35.2% of businesses on its platform, but Anthropic climbed to 30.6%, narrowing the gap to 4.6 percentage points from 11 points in February. (ramp.com) A month earlier, Ramp reported Anthropic at 24.4% of businesses and said OpenAI’s adoption rate had fallen 1.5% in February, its largest one-month drop since Ramp began tracking the category. Ramp also said Anthropic was winning about 70% of head-to-head matchups among businesses buying artificial intelligence services for the first time. (ramp.com) The market has been moving from broad access to workplace rollouts for more than two years. OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Enterprise in August 2023 as a business tier with admin controls and security features, and Anthropic launched Claude Enterprise in September 2024 with a larger context window and internal knowledge integrations. (openai.com) (claude.com) Ramp’s data also points to a divide in who is buying. Venture capital-backed companies had an 80% adoption rate in March, private equity-backed companies were at 64%, and all other businesses were at 45%, according to Ramp. (ramp.com) The 50% mark does not mean half of all U.S. companies are fully running on artificial intelligence. It means half of the businesses in Ramp’s sample are now paying for these tools, a sign that the market has moved beyond free experiments and into recurring software budgets. (ramp.com 1) (ramp.com 2)
