Per-seat pricing had a good run. AI just ended it
For most of my career, budgeting for software was one of the easier line items. You knew your headcount, you knew your per-seat rate, you multiplied the two, added an inflation assumption, and moved on to harder problems. It wasn’t exciting, but it was predictable — and predictability is most of what a CFO wants from a vendor relationship.
That predictability is now being tested by AI agent economics. When software’s value came from how many people used it, pricing by seat made sense. When a growing share of the work is done by agents working alongside people, the value model changes. And even if an agent is logging in on its own account, the value isn’t measured in adoption — it’s about impact. If you architect your AI systems effectively, you can have fewer people and more output with AI. Under a pure per-seat model, that would look like...
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