Figures from Revolut Business indicate that monthly corporate expenditure on AI-related tools increased by 406% over the preceding twelve months. The data encompass transaction and expenditure records drawn from more than 850,000 commercial accounts.
Corporate AI investment outpaces consumer spending by a considerable margin, according to available figures. Monthly outlays per corporate user averaged USD $416, while those for a typical retail customer came in at USD $42. Expenditure on artificial intelligence by consumers climbed 259% over the equivalent period.
Data point to the sector advancing well past the early adoption phase. Companies are consolidating their AI vendor relationships rather than abandoning the technology following brief trial periods. Among enterprise users, OpenAI recorded the strongest retention figure at 89.9%, with Anthropic close behind at 89.7% and Cursor posting 85.4%.
Concurrently, nearly a third of corporate users on smaller platforms migrated to competing services, while roughly one in ten discontinued their use of monitored AI tools entirely. Two patterns appear to be taking shape: market activity gravitating toward a select group of well-known providers, alongside a readiness among businesses to switch vendors when smaller platforms lose their appeal.
Data on AI expenditure points to a shift toward ongoing operational budgets rather than short-term pilot allocations. Among AI-adopting companies in the dataset, the smallest enterprises accounted for nearly four-fifths of all firms and contributed close to three-fifths of total expenditure. Expenditure tends to climb in proportion to organisational scale.
Monthly AI expenditure averaged USD $236 at companies employing between one and ten people, rising to USD $2,031 among those with workforces of 51 to 200 staff, according to July 2026 data. Data indicates that enterprises of greater scale are allocating larger budgets to artificial intelligence as adoption spreads across a wider range of business operations.
The findings point to the pace at which micro-businesses have taken up the technology. Automation tools capable of handling tasks such as drafting, coding, data analysis, or customer interactions could allow smaller enterprises to grow their productivity without proportionally expanding their workforce.
Firms in consulting, IT, and business services were responsible for 66.4% of total AI expenditure recorded in the dataset, even though they represented just 25.8% of the active companies on the platform. Such sectors typically depend on knowledge-intensive processes, structured documentation, and digital operations, positioning them among the first to allocate budgets toward large language models, coding tools, and adjacent AI-driven technologies.
This pattern points to an uneven spread of AI uptake across the wider economy, with industries built around digital workflows adopting the technology at a faster pace than those whose day-to-day operations rely less heavily on such tools.
The platform draws on anonymised and aggregated payment data from its worldwide portfolio of business clients, encompassing AI tool adoption rates, expenditure levels, spending per account, vendor loyalty, and patterns broken down by industry, region, and company scale. The benchmark tracks both foundational artificial intelligence tools and supporting infrastructure, covering areas such as GPU cloud provision and model-serving platforms. Under this framework, any company that completes at least one payment to a monitored AI vendor within a given month is counted as an AI user.
The totals encompass subscription fees, token purchases, and prepaid credits, so the data captures aggregate expenditure across AI providers rather than spending on any one product type.
James Gibson, Head of Revolut Business, noted that AI expenditure had grown faster than any other spending category the company had tracked, with no indication that the rate of expansion was easing. Gibson noted that Revolut Business would continue to develop and adapt its platform to serve the hundreds of thousands of enterprises using its services throughout the period of change.
Gibson also noted the potential for changes in how enterprises procure AI as the sector matures, observing that while AI expenditure was forecast to keep growing over the coming years, the arrival of more AI-native products on the market could see a portion of that outlay migrate from direct token purchases toward third-party software providers.
