The Census Bureau asks if firms are using AI "to help produce goods or services". I guess that's intended to exclude not-yet-productive investigations, and maybe also indirect uses--does LLM-powered OCR for the expense reports for the travelling sales representatives for a widget factory count? That's all vague enough that I guess it works mostly as a sentiment check, where the absolute value isn't meaningful but the time trend might be.
The Ramp chart seems to use actual payment information from companies using their accounting platform. That should be more objective, though they don't disclose much about their methodology (and their customers aren't necessarily representative, the purpose and intensity of use aren't captured at all, etc.).
> The Census Bureau asks if firms are using AI "to help produce goods or services"
That's odd. I use AI tools at work occasionally, but since our business involves selling physical goods, I guess we would not count as an AI adopter in this survey.
After more investigation, I'm not sure what question was asked. I quoted that exact language from Apollo, and the Census Bureau uses very similar language in the spreadsheet with the aggregated responses, at
I'm unable to find a questionnaire with that language, though. I found a different questionnaire with many AI-related questions, some of which I believe would usefully capture both your situation and my hypothetical above. None closely match that language, though. The closest might be question 23, but that asks about use "in any of its business functions".
After yet more investigation, I think I found the questionnaire. Question 7 asks:
> Between MMM DD – MMM DD, did this business use Artificial Intelligence (AI)
in producing goods or services? (Examples of AI: machine learning, natural language processing, virtual agents, voice recognition, etc.)
The Ramp chart seems to use actual payment information from companies using their accounting platform. That should be more objective, though they don't disclose much about their methodology (and their customers aren't necessarily representative, the purpose and intensity of use aren't captured at all, etc.).
https://ramp.com/data/ai-index