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Atlanta Fed: Companies Using AI Will Spend About $1,024 per Employee on AI in 2026

The Atlanta Fed’s Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU) October monthly report shows that executives at companies using AI said their firms would spend about $1,024 per employee on AI and AI-related technologies in the 2026 calendar year, nearly double the about $522 in 2025.

The survey was conducted from September 14 to 25, 2026, among about 1,500 respondents in senior finance and management roles at U.S. companies, covering all U.S. states and major industries. The spending range includes software, subscription services, hardware, employee training, and IT staff support; companies that do not use AI are recorded as 0, and the results are employment-weighted and winsorized at the 5th and 95th percentiles within employment categories.

The Atlanta Fed said at the same time that large companies are spending faster than small companies on this item. The monthly report also showed that nearly 97% of companies in the panel plan to use some form of AI technology in the next 12 months.

Original sources:

  1. Title: Survey of Business Uncertainty Monthly Report October 2026 Publisher: Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (Brent Meyer, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Kevin Foster, Emil Mihaylov) Date of publication: 2026-10 (based on survey responses from October 12-23, 2026) URL: https://www.atlantafed.org/-/media/Project/Atlanta/FRBA/Documents/datafiles/research/surveys/business-uncertainty/monthly-report/2026/2026-10.pdf Source type: official document Verification status: This read used the PDF text content (including relevant wording on page 9); accessed on 2026-10-30 Support content: Executives at companies using AI reported about $1,024 per employee in AI and related technology spending; survey timing, scope, weighting and winsorization method; 97% of companies plan to use AI technology in the next 12 months

  2. Title: Business execs say their firms are spending more than $1,000 per employee on AI this year, but large firms are outpacing small ones. Publisher: Atlanta Fed (@AtlantaFed) Date of publication: 2026-10-28 URL: https://x.com/AtlantaFed/status/2115473364953252254 Source type: official post Verification status: This read used the full text of the post; accessed on 2026-10-30 Support content: Executives said their companies are spending more than $1,000 per employee on AI this year; large companies are outpacing small ones

  3. Title: Companies using AI now spend an average of $1,024 per employee on it Nearly 2x what they spent last year Publisher: a16z (@a16z) Date of publication: 2026-10-30 URL: https://x.com/a16z/status/（相关帖，链接至Charts of the Week） Source type: media/institutional post Verification status: This read used the post and related reporting; accessed on 2026-10-30 Support content: Companies using AI spend an average of $1,024 per employee, nearly twice last year’s level (consistent with the $522 to $1,024 figures relayed by Moses Sternstein and others)

ABAB AI Insight

The Atlanta Fed’s SBU, long maintained by Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Brent Meyer and others, has systematically tracked business expectations and uncertainty since the 2010s, and in recent years has repeatedly added AI-specific questions. In May 2026, its macroblog reported, based on an earlier survey, that employment-weighted average AI spending per employee rose from $1,358 in 2025 to an expected $2,068 in 2026 (with 99th-percentile winsorization). This October monthly report gives a lower $1,024 under a stricter 5/95 winsorization and a “companies using AI only” scope, reflecting how sensitive the average is to the tail under different treatments.

The spending path is the self-reported combined total of software subscriptions, hardware, training, and IT support from surveyed firms, and its nature is a mix of operating and capital investment rather than external financing or equity transactions. Large firms leading and the overall figure nearly doubling indicate a shift from pilots to scaled deployment; however, it contrasts with contemporaneous Ramp AI Index data, which show that the median company spends only about $12 per employee per month, while the top 1% spend as much as several thousand dollars, indicating that this average is still pulled up by higher-spending companies.

Compared with the institution’s May 2026 report, this figure is closer to the everyday cost of tools around the median rather than an extreme capital-intensive deployment; compared with historical per-employee corporate IT spending, $1,024 has entered a measurable operating-budget range, but it is still far below even a fraction of a software engineer’s annual salary.

This level changes the benchmark for per-labor AI costs within the “companies using AI” group, lifting it from last year’s roughly $522 to a range that can be stacked with basic SaaS seats, while preserving the structure of faster large-company adoption and relatively slower small- and medium-sized companies. The indicator to watch is the uncapped distribution details in subsequent SBU or NBER working papers, as well as whether actual delivery keeps up with self-reported budgets.

ABAB News · Cognitive Law

  1. Companies using AI nearly doubled their per-employee AI spending in one year, with the average still pulled up by large firms.

  2. Different winsorization and sample scopes can make per-employee AI spending figures from the same institution differ by nearly a factor of two.

  3. Median companies spending a dozen-plus dollars a month and the top 1% spending thousands coexist; the average is only the middle narrative of the distribution.