They show two different surveys that are supposed to show the same underlying truth but differ by a factor of 3x? For the Ramp survey: why the sudden jump from 30% to 50% in March? For the Census one: How could it possibly be that only 12% of companies with more than 250 people „adopted“ (whatever that means) AI? It would be interesting if it were true but these charts don’t make any sense at all to me

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.).

https://ramp.com/data/ai-index