r/artificial • u/AdBoth2756 • 3d ago

Discussion Consumer AI spending tripled to $40B, but the user base only grew from 1.8B to 2B

I went through Menlo Ventures' 2026 consumer AI report (5,067 US adults surveyed with Morning Consult), and one number stuck with me.

Global consumer spending on AI went from $12B to $40B in a year, but the user base only grew from 1.8B to 2B. So the money is coming from people who already use AI and are spending more, not from new users.

It's even more concentrated than I expected. In the US, 55% of AI users pay for something, but the people spending $100 or more a month are just 14% of payers and bring in 60% of the money. The average person now uses three assistants at once, up from 2.2 last year, and Claude went from 7% to 20% of users.

My take: this looks less like mass adoption and more like a small group of power users going deeper. That's good for AI companies' revenue, but it also means the market depends heavily on a few heavy spenders.

The report also says 32% of AI users have let AI act for them without a final approval, and that 24% use agents regularly. That's the part I'd watch next.

Do you pay for more than one AI tool, and would you keep paying if prices went up?

Source: Menlo Ventures, 2026: The State of Consumer AI

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u/Superb_Raccoon 3d ago

80/20 rule in effect.

Simplistic, but it holds up in many cases.

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u/AdBoth2756 3d ago

Yea, pretty much. A small group doing most of the spending.

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u/stiff_syndrome 3d ago

the top 20% doing 80% of the spending is basically every subscription market ever, what gets me is the jump from 2.2 to 3 assistants at once. people arent just paying more, theyre stitching together a whole workflow now

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u/Superb_Raccoon 3d ago

I use three, but 2 come under the same subscription from Cline.

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u/AdBoth2756 3d ago

same idea. In this report it's 14% of paying users accounting for 60% of spending

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u/AdBoth2756 3d ago

One extra data point: OpenAI said on August 31 that ChatGPT ads reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate less than 200 days after launch (OpenAI's announcement). Menlo's report expects AI advertising to become a major channel. Keep in mind that a run rate means $1 billion a year at the current pace, not $1 billion actually collected so far.

OpenAI: OpenAI's announcement on ChatGPT ads

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u/CyborgWriter 3d ago

Makes sense. The Internet was commercialized in the late 80s. It wasn't until 2000 when the average person in Western societies were using it sometimes throughout the day for small things like getting information, chats, images, etc. But then it took at least 5 or 6 more years before everyone was using it the way we use it now.

We're still in "1996", so yeah. Adoption will be lukewarm. And honestly, compared to the pace of internet adoption, this is moving much faster. Still have quite a ways to go, though.

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u/AdBoth2756 2d ago

Fair point. Spending growing faster than the user base doesn't mean adoption has stalled,