Salesforce shifts to flat-rate AI pricing as customers demand predictable costs over usage models

AI Agents Become Economic Actors: Salesforce Rewrites the Rules of Pricing

Salesforce's shift to flat‑rate, unlimited‑usage pricing for AI agents materially changes competitive dynamics. It does more than compress price points -- it reframes AI agents as economic actors that generate business value, not metered features that incur variable cost. AELA Marks A Strategic Bet On Long‑Term Agent Value Salesforce's new Agentic Enterprise Licensing Agreement (AELA) gives customers unlimited use of consumption‑based products, such as AgentForce, Data Cloud/360, and MuleSoft for a fixed fee over two or three years. At a recent conference, CRO Miguel Milano reinforced the strategic intent, noting Salesforce is "okay with losing money on some AI deals." His rationale: if customers use agents so extensively that Salesforce loses money, those customers become "the happiest" -- and Salesforce has decades to monetize the value created. Market Leaders Are Normalizing AI As A Native, Not Add‑On, Capability This follows a pattern among market leaders. Microsoft has consolidated specialized Copilots into Microsoft 365 Copilot, reinforcing a simple per‑user model that encourages broad adoption. Google has folded Gemini into Workspace tiers -- embedding AI into Docs, Gmail, Sheets, and search-like workflows -- making AI feel like native capability, not an incremental add-on. Salesforce Pushes Further: Agents Priced As Productive Assets, Not Utilities But Salesforce has pushed further. With AELA, it is no longer charging by action, token, or conversation. The implicit message: the value of AI agents is not correlated to usage volume but to the economic outcomes they enable. Accepting short‑term unprofitability only makes sense when a vendor believes agents materially reshape enterprise cost structures, productivity, or growth. The pricing signals confidence that agent-driven value is durable and monetizable over time. Enterprise Buyers Will Shift From Usage Questions To Investment Logic For buyers -- especially CFOs, who increasingly govern AI budgets -- this shifts AI from a variable-cost experiment to a strategic, multi‑year investment. When agents are framed as productive assets rather than utilities, buyers shift from usage questions to capital‑allocation questions: * What economic output will this generate? * What is the ROI and IRR? * What is the useful life of the agent? Vendors With Clear Value Attribution Will Gain Pricing Power This reframing advantages vendors with strong value‑attribution clarity -- those that can credibly demonstrate outcomes like case resolution rates or cycle-time reductions. Vendors should resist attempts to out-bundle or out-license Salesforce and Microsoft. Instead, they must anchor pricing to measurable business results. The more constrained and specific the agent's scope, the easier it is to attribute value and support outcome‑ or output‑based pricing.

Salesforce willing to lose money on AI to lock in customers

Flat-rate deals may sting now, but vendor expects payback over decades Salesforce's chief revenue officer has said that he is relaxed about the CRM giant losing money on AI agent seat-based licensing in the long term because it will have many more years to "monetize" such customers. The SaaS vendor has introduced an Agentic Enterprise License Agreement (AELA), a flat, seat-based arrangement that CEO Marc Benioff said was becoming popular among customers. It had previously mooted per-conversation and consumption-based pricing for its AI agent platform, on which it is staking its future. Speaking at the Barclays 23rd Annual Global Technology Conference, Miguel Milano, president and chief revenue officer, said he expected most of Salesforce's customers to base their plans for "digital labor" on the company's AI agent platform. He promised investors that the company's ability to "monetize" those relationships would be three to four times the business it is doing with such customers in CRM, marketing, and data analytics, for example. As such, if a customer wanted to exceed their product usage beyond what is profitable to Salesforce under a flat-rate deal, that would be OK with Milano. "We take the risk because we want our customers to be successful. There's nothing that I would love [more than] a customer that I price... at $5 million incremental AELA, and the customer deploys so much that all of a sudden, that deal is not profitable for me. If that is not profitable for me, it means that the customer is the happiest customer in the world. And then I have another 20 years to monetize that customer. So I'm not worried about that," he said, admitting that this might be an extreme example of the kind of relationship he imagines. Milano also said pay-as-you-go deals would be available to customers who want them, but most would like to pre-commit spending on the AI platform. The promise to "monetize" customers echoes a warning from tech research firm Forrester, which said in an August report that "the era of monetization has begun." It said that to benefit from AI agent platforms, organizations faced a "monumental" effort in retraining their employees in new workflows. However, such a strategy also "dramatically increases vendor lock-in and the strategic risk of your choice," the analyst warned. Earlier this year, Benioff said moving customers onto an AI agent platform represented "a very high margin opportunity" for Salesforce. Last week, the CEO also promised customers would get between three and ten times more value from its products by using its AI platform. ®

Salesforce opts for seat-based AI licensing

Analysts say the shift offers stability, but embedded usage caps ensure vendors keep control Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff last week came closer to answering a multibillion-dollar question when he said seat-based pricing - with some caveats - was becoming the norm for its AI agents after flirting with pricing based on consumption and per-conversation payments. While there is much debate about how users will get money back from investing in AI agents, the stakes are also high when it comes to how they pay for them. Gartner has forecast that agentic AI could drive around 30 percent of enterprise application software revenue by 2035, surpassing $450 billion, up from 2 percent in 2025. Vendors supporting the pillars of enterprise for most large organizations - names like SAP, Oracle, Workday, and Infor - all see AI agents as a big part of their plans. Salesforce has bet big on AI agents to boost productivity among its users, and it expects commensurate returns. "We're talking about 3x, 4x the ability to multiply the monetization on customers because, by the way, they're getting 3 or 4x or 10x more value from our products," Benioff told investors last week. But with concern raging about how many jobs AI might replace, the CRM giant was presented with a dilemma should it continue with seat-based licensing: the more customers benefit from AI's promised productivity gains, the less they might end up paying as they cut staff. Benioff said customers were keen on its Agentic Enterprise License Agreement (AELA) introduced in October, which offers a flexible menu of options and reusable credits in a single package, based on the number of seats. That's now the preferred option for licensing. "When we first started with Agentforce, we were talking about [charging] so much per conversation. It was this type of pricing, maybe transaction-based pricing, usage-based pricing, but customers have pushed for more flexibility," he said. The switch back to seat-based pricing is a sign that, in the current phase, users are not buying AI agents to replace people, and that they want some certainty in the pricing model before investing in the much-promoted technology, according to Jan Cook, senior software licensing expert with Gartner. "Customers still adopt a cautious approach to investing in GenAI because of the unpredictability of pricing models," he told The Register. "Vendors have wrestled with pricing, trying to find a balance between profiting and achieving a return on their own investments, with ensuring that pricing provides value to customers." While users might welcome the return to seat-based licensing to ensure costs are predictable and help sketch out return on investment calculations, there are some caveats for most vendors, he warned. "They still have an underlying currency called AI units. Most vendors are moving in that direction. They've got seat-based, per-user pricing, but that normally comes with some secondary license metric. For example, a license might come with a provisioned limit of credits. If that's exceeded, you would have to top up those credits. In other cases, seat-based licenses come with 'fair use limits,' meaning it's not truly unlimited, but it allows vendors some ability to control the impact of potential overuse of GenAI solutions." The approach allows tech departments to get what they want in terms of more predictable costs, avoiding signing blank checks to spiraling usage until they understand how employees respond to the new tech. Meanwhile, vendors retain underlying control to ensure software is not overused and they end up losing money on calls to large language models, which they ultimately pay for at the back end. "The big question always was, are we looking to save money by replacing humans with AI, or are we looking to arm the business with AI technology to make ourselves more effective at what we do, and thus giving us a competitive advantage? It seems to be the latter. GenAI pricing has been around long enough: if there was going to be a mass seat shrinkage issue that would have emerged [by now] and customers would be renegotiating contracts on lower seat volumes. We haven't seen that to any significant extent," Cook said. Both more predictable costs and viable use cases are spurring the steady growth of AI agent implementations. "It's not a sharp spike in adoption, but what we see is a very predictable, steady adoption trajectory for most vendors, which was slow in the beginning, but it is steady," he said. Others see a rocky road ahead for the adoption of AI agents. Forrester predicts that using AI for financially driven layoffs can backfire: 55 percent of employers regret laying off workers because of AI. Meanwhile, more people in charge of AI investment expect it to increase headcount (57 percent) than decrease it (15 percent) over the next year. Earlier this year, the analyst firm warned that for vendors, "the era of experimentation is over, and the era of monetization has begun," while users face an increased risk of vendor lock-in, and "the unglamorous work of process redesign," if they are to make gains from their AI investments. In this context, it was hardly reassuring when Benioff told investors that the introduction of AI agents into its software represented a "very high margin" opportunity for his business. Lisa Singer, Forrester principal analyst, told The Register that the downside of the seat-based approach to AI licensing is that if end user uptake is below expectations, "the buyer might be paying for users that are minimally using the products." In the near term, vendors will continue to use a range of commercial models for AI agents, she said. Hybrid models will include a flat fee plus usage-based pricing on actions or workflows. "Copilots will continue as seat-based since their usage is tied to humans and generally use is predictable. Workflow automation agents will migrate to pricing based on usage or outputs or outcomes," she said. Users can also try to get a fair share of any benefits from AI without the vendors' hunger for margin taking an unwarranted slice of the pie. "Users can ensure they share the gains through outcome-based pricing where the vendor and the customer share in the productivity gains, revenue uplift, and so on. This pricing model will require a great deal of information sharing to track the gains and attribute them to the agentic/agent offering. Transparency and a great deal of trust will be required on both sides," Singer said. This is the challenge for in-house tech leadership. Not only do they have to implement a new technology with a seemingly infinite number of things that could get in the way of the business value - user behavior, data quality, software failure, model hallucinations, take your pick - they also have to keep an eye on a meter that has been rewired and most likely skewed toward the vendor's margins. And they said AI would make life easier. ®

Salesforce says per-user pricing will be new AI norm

The company isn't worried about reduced headcounts losing it per-seat subscriptions Salesforce CEO Mac Benioff has alluded to a return to seat-based pricing for agentic AI, after the company experimented with usage and conversation-based models. It seems that customers were demanding for predictability and flexibility in terms of pricing, and that they have so far been fond of the company's Agentic Enterprise License Agreement (AELA). "When we first started with Agentforce, we were talking about, oh, it's going to be so much per conversation... but customers have pushed for more flexibility," Benioff said in last week's earnings call. Salesforce believes that there are also opportunities to charge more for artificial intelligence - customers could expect "three or four times or 10 times more value" from the company's products, so it could easily justify "three times, four times the ability to multiply the monetization on customers." However AI comes at a cost, because it seems companies are buying the technology to improve worker output rather than replace them entirely, leaving them with two worker resource bills (human and AI). "In most companies, humans are also going to increase," Chief Revenue Officer Miguel Milano explained. To this tune, Salesforce doesn't seem to be too bothered about charging on a per-seat basis, because companies aren't significantly dropping workers (and therefore seats). Moreover, half (55%) of the companies that fired workers to replace them with AI said they regretted their decision in a survey earlier this year, and many leaders have even written off headcount decreases as a result of artificial intelligence. On the flip side, it's Salesforce's customers who may not reap the rewards of seat-based pricing, with some users barely scratching the surface of the tools available, rendering their seats poor value for money. Looking ahead, it's unclear how the landscape will play out, but a mix of seat-based and consumption-based pricing could be an effective way to ensure customer value. Speculation about a revision to pricing strategies broke as the company posted a 9% year-over-year increase in quarterly revenue. Now in its fourth and final quarter of fiscal 2026, Salesforce has also upped its full-year revenue expectations from $41.45 billion to $41.55 billion.