Ibbaka AI Monetization Roundtable Survey Report

Steven Forth is CEO of Ibbaka. Connect on LinkedIn

The Ibbaka Research group has been busy this fall.

In October we published the PeakSpan Ibbaka Net Revenue Retention Survey Report for 2024.

Today we are making available the Monetizing Generative AI Survey Results.

Get this survey report here.

This report summarizes the key insights and results from a survey conducted by Ibbaka to inform our roundtable discussion on Sept. 19, 2024, with Kyle Poyar of Growth Unhinged and Michael Mansard of Zuora and the Subscribed Institute.

This is not Ibbaka’s annual research report. The insights shared here come from a survey conducted to inform the roundtable. More than 250 people responded to the survey and it gives some insight into where people’s thoughts and minds were at in September 2024.

Key Insights

• Pricing approaches for horizontal and vertical applications are diverging sharply with horizontal applications relying on tokens and models while vertical applications are being framed as agents with pricing based on actions and outcomes

• The most common approach to pricing is value based pricing, followed by willingness to pay and then cost plus pricing. Generative pricing is emerging as a compelling alternative for applications where configurations are dynamic and value is context-dependent

• The B2B SaaS community is divided on the future impact of generative AI with four attitudes apparent

• This is transformative - a disruptive innovation

• This is a critical sustaining innovation - it is important but does not change the fundamentals of SaaS

• This is only relevant for targeted and specialized applications - it is not relevant to everything

• This is hype, the models will degrade or collapse and something else will become the bright and shiny thing

• All three views of the future may hold true at different points of time, with sustaining innovation and specialist applications leading the first wave of adoption followed by disruption as the models become more diverse and powerful and new categories are created

Ibbaka’s next major research project is its annual deep dive into AI Monetization. Our 2023 report (available on the Resources page of the Ibbaka website). In this research, we try to answer the following questions.

1. How are generative AI applications being monetized?

2. What pricing metrics are being used?

3. What package patterns are being used?

4. What growth motions are being used?

5. How is the adoption of generative AI impacting SaaS operating margins