AI Agents and the Transforming Software Business Model

0:00Will companies pay thousands monthly for AI agents? One OpenAI leader thinks so, and today we're exploring the pricing model and the business model of AI agents in the future. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show notes.

0:23Hello, friends. Quick note before we dive into today's episode. I am traveling a bit for work today, so today we are just doing a main episode. We will not be doing the headlines. Tomorrow we should be back to normal with our normal types of episodes. This is a really good topic, so I think you're going to enjoy it. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today we are talking about something really interesting. It's one of the big themes going into 2025 as we think about the business model for AI and what it'll mean for business model disruption in other areas of software. And the specific genesis of this conversation is a recent interview with OpenAI CFO Sarah Fryer.

0:56The topic of conversation was how much companies will pay for AI tools. And this gets at a broader conversation that was summed up by Aaron Levy of Box recently, who said, one of the most fun questions in AI right now will be how AI agents will be priced over time. So let's hear what Sarah Fryer had to say and then come back and put it in a larger context. So in this recent interview, Fryer was asked about a recent report that OpenAI had considered pricing premium subscriptions to ChatGPT for as much as$2 ,000 per month. Presumably, this was for a future iteration of the technology, maybe an agentic version, but it still was a big flashy price tag.

1:33And what it said clearly to people was that OpenAI was thinking about this as a replacement for people, not just as an augmentation. When asked about those reports, Fryer said, I want the door open to everything. If it's helping me move around the world with a literal PhD-level assistant for anything that I'm doing, there are certain cases where that would make all the sense in the world. And indeed, the logic here is that you're charging based on the value companies get from the technology and that the value is the equivalent of actually hiring someone. $2 ,000 a month is a lot if you're comparing it to a ChatGPT subscription currently.

2:04It's not a lot if you're comparing it to a paralegal that you don't have to hire now. Fryer gets explicit about this. How much you have had to finance that otherwise? Would you have had to go out and hire more people? How do you think about the replacement cost to some degree? And how do we create a fair pricing for that? I recently did an episode about how I think agents and job replacement is all going to play out. And the TLDRs, I think it's going to be a lot about how organizations treat the opportunity. Do they see AI just as a cost-cutting technology where they can have the same outputs for lower inputs?

2:32Or are they thinking about how they get a competitive edge and go farther than their competitors by producing way more, adding on way better levels of service, et cetera? I'm not going to get as much into that particular conversation today, although it is notable that yet again we have another example of how the Overton window is shifting on being okay discussing AI agents as actually job replacing. When it comes to OpenAI itself, the company certainly needs to find a way to boost revenue. During their October fundraising round, they projected a tripling in revenue to$11.6 billion by the end of next year and$100 billion in revenue by 2029.

3:02Those figures are what's required to keep up with escalating training costs without needing to upsize their already record fundraising efforts. Presumably, even price hikes and massive growth in consumer subscriptions won't be enough. We are starting to also get experiments with premium tiers from OpenAI. Announced last week, their$200 per month ChatGPT Pro offering has seemed to be well-received by hardcore enthusiasts and first adopters, but it's not even intended to see wide-scale adoption. The main drawcard, O1 Pro Mode, is designed as a research-grade chatbot with never-before-seen performance on questions that require PhD-level reasoning.

3:35The reality is that there are few consumers that need a chatbot with that much power, at least in the way that people think about use cases now. I'm hesitant to say that that will be the case forever because I think the availability of that level of intelligence will create its own demand, but I think that's going to take a lot of time. And of course, before that's really clear that there's value there, getting people to subscribe at that recurring level is going to be difficult. The release of Sora certainly brought additional value to the pro tier, although I wouldn't be surprised if we see Sora also become available on its own.

4:03There's also the interesting question of what exactly OpenAI is trying to be when it grows up. Professor Ethan Malek wrote, OpenAI has a lot of pieces on the board right now. Multimodal vision and voice, small, large, and reasoning models, image and video creation, code execution, mobile and desktop apps, web search, some agentic stuff. Very curious when it will be glued together into a single thing. Now, of course, the presumption here is that this is all adding up to a whole greater than the sum of the parts, and I do think that that's the case. Chris Pedregal, the CEO of Granola, recently made an interesting suggestion in a post on Every, where he wrote that there's a gap in the top of the market just waiting to be captured.

4:36He wrote,

4:56And the tension here, of course, is how much OpenAI is going for Honda versus Ferrari. But holding aside the OpenAI-specific example, I want to come back to this question of what the future business model for agents is going to be. You might have heard some version of this thesis that Y Combinator has been sharing recently, for example, on why vertical AI agents could be 10 times bigger than SaaS. The argument effectively comes down to the idea that instead of paying for software, people are paying for labor replacement. Ben Lang did a summary of a recent conversation from YC, writing, AI replaces both software and labor costs.

5:32Companies spend way more on employees than they do on software. Smaller companies will be way more efficient and need way less humans. But of course, what follows here is this interesting murky space where companies spend 10 times the amount on labor than they do on software, but it's very unlikely to me to be a one-to-one replacement of current labor costs with new software-based labor costs. One of the big questions, I think, is what the appropriate cost reduction is. Are AI agents that can replace human tasks going to be 50 % of the cost of the equivalent labor? Or are they going to be 1 % of the cost of the equivalent labor?

6:07And which market forces are going to dictate that? Is competition between agent companies ultimately going to be a race to the bottom, where the cost reduction is massive? These are really big questions. And we're just starting to see how these experiments play out. Going back to that post from Aaron Levy from Box, again, he started, one of the most fun questions in AI right now will be how AI agents will be priced over time. One approach is to leverage the very clear relationship between AI agents and traditional work, which leads to a pricing model for AI that has agents being priced like labor but at a discount.

6:38An AI agent performs a certain amount of work and you pay for amount of time or units it took to do that work. Given almost any task has some variance, pricing will also vary over time as well. Generally, it's a fair trade for the customer and provider. As a second approach, there's a very clear benefit of AI agents being priced on a per-outcome basis. This model allows for a simple relationship between what the customer needs and what they're paying to get accomplished. It also has the benefit that as underlying AI costs drop over time, service providers can extract more margin for this work.

7:04Equally, though, it will mean some customers have varying degrees of profitability. Further, the moment your service offers N types of value props or outcomes, you need N pricing models to go along with it. A third approach is to price as close to the underlying AI costs as possible, which has the benefit of likely being the lowest cost for a customer. This can be great for technically savvy customers, but has the risk of not being sufficiently abstracted from AI cost to hold value over time. Potentially good for customers, but maybe not for shareholder returns. And finally, there's an approach of maintaining a pure SaaS seat subscription model and offering agents to users that do unlimited work attached to a seat.

7:36Depending on the use case and how many seats the customer would need, this model could be quite disruptive. In areas where there are a lot of seats used by end users, it's possibly very strategic. In areas where there's only a small number of seats, you're likely giving up too much value. In all, lots of different approaches and probably many more than the above, but fairly exciting times to watch new business models and software emerge after a decade plus of limited change. So that provides an interesting overview of a bunch of different options on how this could play out. Today's episode is brought to you by Vanta.

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9:51Go to bsuper.ai to learn more about this AI enablement network. And now, back to the show. However, interestingly, Sierra, which is Brett Taylor, who is the board chairman of OpenAI and a former leader at Meta, among other companies, his new AI agent startup, their team yesterday published a blog post called Outcome-Based pricing for AI agents. I'm going to read some excerpts because this is a ground-level view from a company that's actually trying to figure this out and has raised a boatload of money to do so. Elliot Greenwald, who leads GoToMarket at Sierra, writes, In the 80s and 90s, buying software went something like this.

10:22You'd go to a store like Fry's Electronics, pick up a shrink-wrap box filled with floppy disks, or later a CD-ROM, bring it home and install it. Whether you actually used it or not, you paid for it, and that was that. If you wanted an upgrade, back to the store you went for another box. The internet changed everything, making it possible to sell software differently, as a service. Salesforce pioneered the software as a service or SaaS model, and soon companies like Google, Microsoft, and Adobe adopted it as the new industry standard. SaaS brought numerous benefits. The software was always up to date, and you could add or remove seats as needed.

10:51However, one pricing challenge remained. Once you bought a seat, you paid for it annually regardless of usage. Unused seats sit idly on your proverbial store shelf, hence the derisive moniker, Shelfware. A few years later, at the infrastructure layer, companies like Amazon with AWS and Snowflake introduced consumption-based pricing, where you were charged only for what you used. Whether paying up front or as you went, the contract value ultimately depended on actual usage. More compute or bandwidth meant a bigger bill. Today, AI agents executing processes autonomously enable an entirely new pricing model, where you pay only when the software achieves specific variable outcomes.

11:25In other words, outcome-based pricing. Like consumption-based pricing, outcome-based pricing varies with usage. However, unlike consumption-based pricing, outcome-based pricing is tied to tangible business impacts, such as a resolved support conversation, a saved cancellation, an upsell, a cross-sell, or any number of variable outcomes. If the conversation is unresolved, in most cases there's no charge. As companies increasingly rely on AI agents to represent their brands, establishing this presence requires time and intentional effort. During the initial weeks of deploying a Sierra agent, we iterate to drive continuous improvement.

11:55Elliot continues, while nearly everyone likes the idea of outcome-based pricing in principle, many have understandable concerns about what it means for their business in practice. No one wants to face a massive invoice, navigate an inscrutable set of criteria to confirm an outcome, pay for escalations, or be limited to a single pricing model. And again, from here, he basically just talks about what Sierra's answer to that, which is sort of a, this is the best we can do type of answer where they're trying to minimize those types of surprises. So basically what you're seeing here is the beginning of an argument for why this sort of outcome-based pricing not only makes sense, but is actually better for the customer.

12:28And this is a theme that has been picked up by Salesforce as well. Back in September, the company announced their AgentForce platform, declaring it, quote, what AI was meant to be. And perhaps the most interesting part of the announcement and the thing that people picked most up on was AgentForce's pricing, which starts at$2 per conversation. I think ultimately when I review all of this, we are very early days. It is very clear that the SaaS model is undergoing some tension. Agents are providing competition, potentially making sense to be priced in a different way. But also the general rise of AI, which increases the capability of enterprises and big customers to roll their own solutions, also creates pressure on the companies to be more accommodating of what the buyer is actually looking for.

13:11This is putting downward pressure on SaaS already. And in addition to these totally novel outcome-based pricing models, you're also just seeing more SaaS companies price in a way that's only for used seats, for example. I think right now, the TLDR for me is that everything is up for negotiation. Startups are going to be experimenting mightily and aggressively with all sorts of different models. And until new norms are figured out, enterprises are going to have a ton of power to push and try to find something that works. Ultimately, whatever the pricing model for agents that are a blend of augmenting and replacing human labor, it's going to have to meet a lot of different criteria.

13:45It's going to have to be cheaper than the equivalent human labor, but it's also going to have to be expensive enough, which presumably means more expensive than the way that we price SaaS right now, to reflect the value that it's actually creating. It's going to have to, on the one hand, be dynamic and flexible and able to accommodate to real-time changes in business situations, while at the same time be predictable enough for big companies to plan around. It is going to be no mean feat to hit all these different criteria, which is why it's going to be such a fertile time for experimentation. If you are a startup, I think there has never been a better moment to actually think about pricing dynamics as a core competency and try to do something that makes sense while also pushing the model forward.

14:23And I think if you're a big company, this is a great time to try to form a thesis for yourselves around how you think software should be priced. In our experience at Superintelligent, where startups are is that they want to be paid fairly for the value they're actually providing. And on the big company side, they want to pay for value that's actually being provided. They don't want to be locked into gym memberships, basically. There is actually a lot of common ground in between those two points of view. It's just a matter of figuring out the details. For now, though, that'll be where we wrap this particular AI Daily Brief.

14:51if it's a conversation that I'm sure we will come back to over and over again. Appreciate you listening or watching as always. Until next time, peace.