Agentic Al: A la Carte or Table d'hote?

It's only been a few years since SaaS and Cloud models disrupted the IT licensing landscape with a completely new pricing approach. Will it last now? How do you crunch the 'pay as you use' maths in the AI era?

- Pratima H

A usual business-quiz question. A usual wrong answer. Who 'actually pioneered the sachet concept and shook up the FMCG market in India? It's neither of the CKR sons but their father, Chinni Krishnan. The man who has more than the stamp of his name's initials on the disruptor called Chik shampoo that ignited an idea which made the smartest and richest of MNC giants look again into their marketing books. The idea that something like shampoo can be packaged in a small format and priced affordably for rural people, which spawned a whole new category in itself. Soon, there was small packaging everywhere - from mini-cold drink bottles to detergents in miniature wrappers.

It took some decades before IT also turned fluid and flexible, changing from a soap bar to a shampoo bottle. It also revolutionised how organisations consumed IT - with the easier, more economic and less-wastage-prone avatar of the bottle that Cloud and SaaS (Software as a Service) ushered in. No need to waste chunks of soap bar when you need only a bit. Use what you want. Pay for that and nothing more. Now that Al is being poured in the mix, with the rise of Agentic AI to automate tasks that people and tools have done so far, the bottle is in for a shake-up too. Al agents can now collaborate with, or replace, human seats or software seats, especially with the increasing sophistication, language capabilities, contextual intelligence and nuanced interaction abilities that AI can deliver. Enterprises may hire these agents as solo soldiers or as hybrid human armies in areas like customer care, sales, customer support, healthcare and financial advice. Either way, they have to pay for them. That's where things get a tad complex. Can we 'price' AI agents the way we 'calculated' seats or man-hours or SLAs or outcomes or devices? What new complications, disruptions and sachets can pop up next? What earlier models and pricing cards will pop out of use then?