Zip report finds enterprise AI spending is rising but highly concentrated

Summary

Zip’s first Enterprise AI Index analyzes more than $1 trillion in enterprise spend visibility and approximately $18 billion in approved purchase-request value from participating customers over the past 48 months. It finds that AI vendors’ share of software spending rose from 1.4% to 8.1% between trailing years ending in 2025 and 2026, and 84% of observed companies increased AI’s share of their software budgets. Purchasing became more selective at the same time: 21% of AI-vendor requests were rejected or canceled, versus 12% for other vendors, although the dataset does not identify the reasons. The average active adopter worked with 5.9 AI vendors in the latest period, up from 2.3 in 2023, but its top three vendors still received 95% of AI spending. Across the full cohort, Anthropic, Cursor, and OpenAI accounted for 74% of outlier-adjusted AI-vendor spend, or 67% when companies were weighted equally. Zip says the findings indicate a broader vendor portfolio whose economics remain centered on frontier model providers and a small number of high-value applications. The sample is skewed toward larger technology companies, with 70% from software or fintech and 89% based in North America, and the analysis uses aggregated, de-identified, winsorized approved-purchase data rather than surveys or user counts.