Value Pricing and Billing in the Agent Economy
Steven Forth is CEO of Ibbaka. Connect on LinkedIn
Agents and agentic AI have been dominating conversations about how to package and monetize generative AI and other deep learning approaches.
Salesforce kicked off the current explosion of interest back in September 2024. Just as it had disrupted conventional enterprise software with its ‘No Software’ campaign and launched the subscription economy back in 2000, it was now moving to a ‘No SaaS’ and agent economy world.
In 2025 this movement has gained momentum. There are now many agent first companies and new protocols for orchestrating families of agents are being announced (Model Context Protocol (MCP) from Anthropic and the Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A) from Google).
The shift to agents is having a big impact on how we understand value, package functionality and billing. To get insights into this, billing platform leader Maxio and customer value management and value based pricing leader, Ibbaka, partnered to carry out research into emerging best practices for agents.
The full report can be downloaded here.
The report covers a survey on the agent economy conducted in February and March, with 234 companies responding. Case studies of 7 companies are included, together with a detailed discussion of the requirements for billing systems and an expanded description of the Ibbaka AI Agent Pricing Layer Cake introduced mid-April in Pricing the Agent Economy.
In the report, we define an AI agent as follows:
An agent is a piece of software that takes an action on behalf of a user.
An AI agent is an agent that leverages AI in order to decide what action to take and/or to execute the action.
An AI agent has the ability to observe its environment, take actions based on its observations, and then learn from the results of these actions
The table of contents for the report runs like this
Key Insights
TL:DR (Too Long : Didn’t Read)
Recommendations
For SaaS vendors using agents as a complement to their existing software
For agent native companies
The Agent Economy
What are agents
Why the interest in agents?
Major Commercial moves
Will Agents Replace or Complement People?
How Will Agents Disrupt B2B SaaS?
Agents in the Buying Process
Agents will interact with …
Emerging agent patterns
Agent architectures
Reasoning and Planning
Tool Integration
Hierarchical and Multi-Agent Systems
Interaction and Communication Patterns
Human-Agent Interaction Models
Agent-to-Agent Communication
Integration with Existing Systems
An agent taxonomy
Agent value patterns
Value Creation for Users
Value Creation for Companies
Agent pricing patterns
Agent billing patterns
Implications for Billing Systems in the Agent Economy
Case Studies
Salesforce Agentforce
Intercom Fin AI
Brighthive
Vellum.ai
Lyzer.ai
Synthetic Users
Decagon
Research Results
Are Agents Sustaining Transformative or Disruptive?
Stage of development and deployment
Challenges to Commercialization
Packaging and Integration
The Value of Agents
Pricing model trends
Billing system challenges and requirements
The main challenges in monetizing agents
Clustering
Survey Demographics
Figures and Tables
Glossary
Resources
References
