The Billing Ladder: Five Ways to Price an AI Agent
A support leader I spoke with recently was comparing two quotes. One vendor wanted $85 per seat per month. Another wanted $0.99 per resolution. She was doing the obvious arithmetic: 99 cents is cheaper than 85 dollars, so the AI agent is basically free.
A few months later her AI line item was larger than her seat line item, and nobody had done anything wrong.
The error wasn't in the numbers. It was in treating them as the same kind of number. A seat is a figure you control by headcount. A per-resolution fee is a figure the vendor's model controls by how well it performs. They are denominated in different units, and comparing them on price alone is how budgets get blown by month three.
The useful frame isn't "which pricing model is best." It's a ladder. Each rung changes one thing: who pays when the agent fails.
The...
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