Nathaniel Whittemore

Agents don't log in.

They make API calls.

So what happens to per seat pricing when the primary user of your platform isn't a person?

When one company runs 50 agents that each make more API calls in a day than the entire sales team makes in a month.

Every SaaS company is about to face this question.

Salesforce just forced it into the open by going fully headless.

The ones that figure out agent-native pricing first will own the next cycle.

The ones still charging per seat while agents do the work will get left behind.

Now, interestingly, this idea that the per-seat model was on its last legs has been around for the last few years.

Even before ChatGPT, there was a lot of consternation around this between these SaaS providers and their customers.

In the wake of ChatGPT and the beginning of more advanced generative AI, you saw many companies start to try to at least experiment with outcome-based pricing or just non-seat-based models, but their users were still primarily human and nothing really quite stuck.

What's different about this time is that you actually have a different category of user, where I think different types of natural business models, like these consumption-based models or whatever we figure out works, actually fall naturally out of the new user behavior pattern.

One of the big speculative debates people are having is who captures this new type of value.

Is it horizontal providers like OpenAI and Anthropic?

The old systems of record like Salesforce?

Vertical agents that deal with specific functions and use cases?

And there are debates on all sides of this.

Simon Smith writes, yes, value is shifting from UI to agents and the data and infrastructure to support them, but it's not clear to me that vertically specific Salesforce is best positioned to capture the shifting value.

The AI labs are building vertical agnostic agent infrastructure, and there are many capable data and infrastructure providers in the market already.

Akash Gupta provides the counter-argument.