What Drives AI Adoption?

Business AI adoption crossed 50% for the first time in March, reaching 50.4% of businesses on Ramp. A year ago, it was 35%. Half of the companies in our panel now pay for AI — not experimenting, not piloting, but paying.

Anthropic continued its surge, growing from 24.4% to 30.6% of businesses — a 6.3-point gain in a single month. The gap between OpenAI (35.2%) and Anthropic is now just 4.6 points, down from 11 in February. At this pace, Anthropic overtakes OpenAI within the next two months.

Share of businesses paying for AI

Ramp AI Index — corporate card and invoiced AI vendor payments, Jan 2023–Jan 2026.

How businesses learned to stop worrying and love Anthropic

Last month, the Defense Department designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk. A judge has temporarily blocked the designation, and reports suggest the Pentagon will let some teams keep using Claude anyway. And yet Anthropic's adoption accelerated.

Setting aside the legal question, the credibility of the threat is weakened by what businesses actually did: they shrugged it off and kept buying.

Anthropic already leads in three sectors with the highest AI adoption — information (software), finance, and professional services. That raises a sharper question: if half of businesses now pay for AI, what separates the half that does from the half that doesn't?

Anthropic is near-universal; OpenAI varies by sector

Professional & Business Services

37.2%

99.7%

Information & Technology

43.2%

100%

Financial Services & Real Estate

28.3%

100%

Consumer, Healthcare, Education, Hospitality & Other

19.4%

100%

Industrial, Manufacturing & Logistics

24.2%

100%

OpenAIAnthropic

Share of benchmarked businesses using each provider, by sector. Anthropic shows up almost everywhere; OpenAI adoption ranges widely across sectors.

Follow the money

Ask what kind of company is most likely to use AI, and the intuitive answers sound right: tech companies, big companies, companies in San Francisco. In our data, the single strongest predictor is simpler: who funded you.

Venture capital-backed companies have an 80% AI adoption rate. Private equity-backed companies: 64%. Everyone else: 45%. It holds in every industry we track.

AI adoption by funding source

Share of businesses in each cohort with paid AI vendor spend.

Even in the lowest-adoption industries, the VC effect holds. VC-backed construction firms (77%) and food companies (67%) adopt AI at rates well above their sector averages. Funding source predicts adoption better than the industry a business operates in.

Why does funding background matter this much? Part of it is selection. VCs have always backed founders they believe they can add value to — historically through advice and introductions, increasingly through tooling and technology setup. The selection runs both ways: what VC in 2026 funds a founder who isn't using AI?

VCs also function as a transmission mechanism — portfolio-wide deals, top-down directives, and a cultural expectation that you run on the latest stack. Those forces push adoption above what you'd see from organic discovery alone. PE firms have a version of this too, but the effect is weaker: PE portfolios tend to be less tech-forward and less far along the AI curve. At companies without institutional investors, the decision is left to senior leaders and teams figuring it out on their own.

A prediction

Look to the early adopters. Among VC-backed firms, Anthropic already leads OpenAI. It also leads in the three highest-adoption sectors above. OpenAI still leads in every other sector. That gap won't last.

VC-backed firms prefer Anthropic

Share of VC-backed businesses with paid provider spend.

The pattern in our data is consistent: what early adopters do today, the broader market does a few months later. The early adopters are picking Anthropic.