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

> 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.