Salesforce is considering a new charging model based on AI agent conversations as it attempts to allay investor concerns that improving productivity among users will lead to them buying fewer license seats.

As the CRM giant announced its second quarter results, which met market expectations with a 9 percent increase in revenue to $9.33 billion, an investment analyst asked its CEO whether the company would change its pricing as it introduced AI agents into the sales process.

The concern was the new AI agents could boost productivity among users, deflecting up to 90 percent of calls away from human agents.

"Investors are going to worry about the number of seats being used coming down [because of] those productivity gains," the analyst said. On the earnings call, Marc Benioff said that Salesforce would respond by introducing a new charging model.

He said his personal goal - rather than official guidance - was that by the end of fiscal 2026, the company would introduce 1 billion AI agents into user environments through what Salesforce calls its Agentforce AI platform.

"Let's just think: it's like a manifestation of all these agents talking to all these consumers. When we look at pricing, it will be on a consumption basis … we think about saying to our customers, it's about $2 per conversation," the CEO said.

"It's a very high margin opportunity, as you can imagine … this is how your customers are going to be connecting with you in this new way, and we're going to be helping our customers to manage these conversations.

"It's probably a per-conversation charge as a good way to look at it or we're selling additional consumption credits like we do with our Data Cloud," he said.

Chief operating officer Brian Millham added that Salesforce customers were looking for an "all-in cost" of running a call center. "When you bring a technology that allows you to scale and drive efficiencies in operating that call center, and it's on our technology, we're excited about those conversations because we think we get to monetize all of that incredible innovation through the all-in cost," he said.

When introducing technology designed to raise productivity - potentially doing more work with fewer people - the question is who gets to keep the resulting savings. Salesforce and its customers may have differing views on how that conversation should conclude.

Salesforce's Q2 revenue beat analyst expectations, according to financial media, as results were welcomed by investors concerned about a tough macroenvironment in tech. However, its revenue guidance for Q3 was below expectations.

CFO Amy Weaver, who has been with the vendor for nearly 11 years, has decided to step down. She is set to stay in the role until a successor is appointed. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/29/salesforce_pricing_per_ai_conversation/