Iceberg ahead! We’re only seeing the tip of changes from AI

On a quarterly spend report, $10,000 that used to flow to a freelancer marketplace now shows up as just a few hundred dollars of model usage, tied to an expense platform dataset and a handful of vendors. The shift looks small in a chart, until you translate it into unit economics. 

In a Ramp research paper, Ryan Stevens uses payments data from thousands of firms to track spending from the third quarter of 2021 through the third quarter of 2025, straddling the October 2022 release of ChatGPT. The result delivers a lesson that leaders can apply to real budgets.

The headline result deserves to lead every policy conversation about generative AI and work. Among the most exposed firms, each $1 decline in online labor marketplace spending aligns with about $0.03 of additional spending on AI model providers. That implies cost savings of roughly 97 percent when companies replace outsourced task labor with model usage. 

The roughly 25-to-one expense ratio explains why adoption keeps expanding, even as executives debate hallucinations and brand risk. This gap changes the budget logic for writing drafts, first-pass research, customer support macros, lightweight coding scaffolds, and structured summaries. Contract labor typically scales linearly: more output requires more hours, more invoices, and more coordination time. Model usage scales via throughput: prompts, retrieval, evaluation, and review create a workflow where marginal output costs stay low. 

The paper also shows the substitution in spending shares. Online labor marketplaces fall from 0.66 percent of spend in Q4 2021 to 0.14 percent by Q3 2025, while AI model providers rise to 2.85 percent by........

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