Atlanta Fed: AI spending at US firms using it nearly doubled, now $1,024 per worker

American companies that actually use AI nearly doubled what they spend on it. Spending jumped 96.1% between 2025 and 2026, according to an Atlanta Fed survey, and now averages $1,024 per employee.

That is roughly a doubling in a single year — a pace that says AI budgets have moved from experiment money to line-item money at the firms that have adopted the tech.

Read the qualifier closely: the figure covers firms using AI, not the entire US economy. It is a snapshot of the already-converted, not of the average workplace still deciding whether to bother.

The report, flagged by Cointelegraph, puts the number on a per-employee basis, which makes it comparable across company sizes — a $10 million AI budget means something very different at a 50-person shop than at a 50,000-person one.

What the survey does not spell out: where the money goes. Compute, software licenses, consultants and headcount are all plausible buckets, but the reported figure draws no distinctions, and there is no industry-by-industry breakdown either.

The open question now is whether the curve keeps bending that sharply. A second year of near-100% growth would put AI spending in a different weight class entirely — and would make the firms sitting it out stand out more.