The per-seat pricingmodel — per-user, per-employee, per-month — was a derivative of the old architecture. When agents compress headcount, the pricingmodel must follow.
If 10 agents replace 100 seats, revenue falls 90% unless the vendor migrates to outcome-based pricing. This isn’t hypothetical — it’s already happening:
Harvey AI charges for legal work delivered, not seats
Agentic marketing platforms charge for campaigns executed, not marketers licensed
But outcome-based pricing requires controlling the orchestration layer to measure outcomes — which most SaaS incumbents don’t.
The Structural Challenge
Outcome-based pricing introduces complexity that per-seat pricing avoided:
How do you define and measure “outcomes” consistently?
How do you attribute outcomes when multiple tools and agents contribute?
How do you price when outcome quality varies by use case?
How do you maintain revenue predictability for Wall Street?
These are solvable problems, but they require fundamental changes to sales models, revenue recognition, and organizational incentives — exactly the kind of transformation that large organizations execute slowly.
Three Scenarios
Successful transition: Revenue per customer may actually increase as agents deliver more value
Hybrid purgatory: Both models simultaneously, creating confusion and customer optimization
Seat-based decline: Revenue drops predictably as customers reduce seat counts quarter after quarter
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
