OpenAI Lets Some Customers Pay Only When AI Performs

OpenAI has reportedly begun giving some major customers a new payment option.

Under this system, these clients pay only when the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) does its job, The Information reported Sunday (Aug. 30), citing a source familiar with the matter.

The report notes that this previously unreported change comes as software firms change their pricing practices for AI. As these companies sell more, they are moving from subscription fees to charging customers based on usage and whether the AI helps their company.

According to The Information, customer relationship management software company Salesforce is among the firms adopting this practice, letting businesses choose how they want to pay for its Agentforce AI.

That includes negotiating custom contracts that charge businesses based on how much the AI either grows revenue by helping salespeople close more deals or cuts costs by automating more customer service interactions.

“Customers want to buy and want to price in different ways. This is something I’ve learned really aggressively recently,” CEO Marc Benioff said in a call with investors last week.

The report contends that these comments demonstrate the uncertainty around software pricing amid the rise of AI. Salesforce and companies like it are now facing competition from startups like OpenAI who have launched “outcome-based” pricing.

This practice, the report said, could make it tough to determine when cost savings come from the enterprise customer’s efforts or from the software. To that end, Stripe has issued guidelines for outcome-based pricing, The Information added.

A sales conversion of other successful outcomes “could stem from product tweaks, marketing campaigns or seasonality” rather than the software, the company said. “Unless attribution rules are explicit, customers could argue over whether the outcome belongs to you,” referring to the software provider.

PYMNTS wrote about this trend earlier this year, saying the shift marks a “structural recalibration” of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) economics, not their demise.

The per-seat model of charging for AI use worked because it aligned the incentives of customers, vendors and investors. AI agents make the picture more complicated.

“Software companies are reconsidering pricing as AI systems perform work that would previously have required multiple employees,” that report said. “A customer support platform powered by AI, for example, may resolve a growing share of tickets autonomously. Charging per human support representative becomes less intuitive when much of the work is automated.”