17 August 2026

Enterprise spending on advanced AI models stops growing

Businesses now use frontier models (the most capable AI systems available) for only 6% of their actual work, even though these models account for 11% of their AI spending.
Token usage, the measure of how much text a model processes, has flatlined at this 6% level, suggesting companies have stopped increasing their purchases of expensive advanced models.
The spending-to-usage gap indicates businesses may have hit a ceiling on how much they are willing to pay for cutting-edge AI relative to what they actually deploy it for.

How it was covered

Fable 5 token usage at businesses has remained flat at only 6% of all tokens despite accounting for 11% of spend, suggesting businesses have reached their willingness-to-pay ceiling for the best models.