Salesforce wants to charge for AI outcomes, but first it needs to figure out how
Seats, Flex Credits, and all-you-can-eat contracts make for an 'anxiety-filled architecture'
Salesforce, the $40 billion-a-year SaaS vendor, experienced a global outage during the Dreamforce conference, lasting over seven hours. This incident highlights the company's heavy reliance on its platform. The company is now exploring new pricing structures to accommodate its growing AI capabilities. Traditional per-user licensing is becoming less practical when AI agents and APIs perform tasks instead of named human users.
Salesforce is experimenting with outcome-based pricing, charging customers according to the results achieved by AI systems. However, this approach faces challenges as some AI agents operate across multiple domains, making it difficult to measure outcomes. To address this, Salesforce is also developing bundles and using Flex Credits for consumption-based pricing.
This multi-pronged strategy aims to align pricing with the value customers derive from Salesforce's AI offerings.
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