At the AI Frontier, Token Bills Are Approaching Payroll Scale, a16z and Ramp Find

A joint reading of enterprise card data by Ramp and the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) finds that among the top 1% of AI-heavy companies, spending on model tokens has reached roughly $7,500 per employee each month, or about $90,000 a year, as reported by the AI Post channel and detailed in a16z's own writeup. For reference, average total US worker compensation runs near $98,000. At the frontier, that means annual AI spending per employee is now close to annual pay.

The more important finding for anyone modeling inference economics is about direction. Falling per-token prices have not flattened per-employee spending. They have accelerated it, and the group's monthly figure is growing at a double-digit rate as teams route more work through models once each unit of output gets cheaper. CIO's analysis notes that extrapolating that growth would push the annualized figure past the average US software engineer salary later this year, which is a projection rather than a measured level.

The data carries real caveats. It reflects a narrow leading edge rather than the median firm, and card-spend proxies capture list prices rather than negotiated committed-use discounts. Ramp also reports that these same high-intensity adopters grew headcount over the period, which complicates the simple story that AI is replacing workers.