Rohan Paul

Many small companies that use AI never pay a model vendor directly. They get it inside a CRM, a help-desk tool or a code editor, and the software company pays the AI bill and folds it into the subscription. That's one reason AI spending looks so lopsided. Ramp data shared by Apollo's chief economist Torsten Slok shows - "the top 10% of customers account for 99.5% of model-serving spend and 99% of neocloud spend, leaving the bottom 90% of firms with 0.5% and 1%." Part of that top 10% is likely software companies paying for AI on behalf of thousands of smaller customers. So the long tail is probably using more AI than its own bills show.