Maxio-Ibbaka Survey on Value-Packaging-Pricing-Billing for AgenticAI
Steven Forth is CEO of Ibbaka. Connect on LinkedIn
We are entering a world buzzing with agents of all types, powered by the rapid advances of AI generally and generative AI in particular. Agents have emerged as a preferred way to package advanced AI functionality and take it to market.
Take the Maxio | Ibbaka Survey on the Value, Monetization, and Billing of Agentic AI
Maxio and Ibbaka are partnering to research this rapidly evolving space and define the solutions needed to understand and communicate the value of agents, design pricing, and manage billing.
What are AgenticAI and B2B AI Agents?
What makes an agent an agent? → The ability to take an action.
Agents operate in the part of the design space where there are well defined problems and the AI is able to make a decision and take actions.
Agents are able to do things on your behalf.
Intercom’s FinAI is able to resolve a support ticket.
Autonomous trading agents can make buy sell decisions.
Agents attached to scenarios can send signals about which scenario is resolving.
The list goes on and on (see the categories of AI agents list below).
A co-pilot travels along beside you as you work. An agent goes off and does something for you.
Most of today’s agents take fairly basic actions, and the action often (not always) requires approval by a human before it is committed and can be reviewed after the fact. But both of these caveats are disappearing. More and more agents are being orchestrated into sequences so that they can handle more complex tasks and agents are becoming more and more autonomous. Interesting times.
Why are Maxio and Ibbaka Researching this?
Maxio and Ibbaka are joining to do basic research into the key requirements for the successful commercialization of AI agents. This research is part of our shared commitment to helping B2B software companies succeed in the market.
Successful commercialization has to include the ability to communicate, deliver, and document value, packaging, the capture of value in price, and billing (the entire lead-to-cash process).
This research has several dimensions:
This survey
A series of in-depth interviews with industry leaders and influencers
Generation of synthetic data to explore different approaches to packaging, pricing, and billing
A scan and analysis of existing agents, how they are packaged and priced
Key commercial requirements for agents
To successfully take agents to market innovators need to be able to understand and act on four critical things.
Value: Agents need to provide value or they will not be used. No value, nothing to price.
Packaging: Functionality can be packaged in many different ways to take to market. What function goes in which agent? Aligning value and function in the same package is critical. An agent is a type of package.
Pricing: Agents are opening up many new pricing models, and at least some will be priced using outcome based pricing. The agent era will be one of pricing innovation.
Billing: Having a price does not help if you have no way to bill and collect. Agents introduce new challenges for billing systems and revenue recognition.
The wonderful world of AI Agents
There are many different AI agents being taken to market. The variety is already mind-boggling. Part of this research will be to look for the underlying and emergent patterns that will define successful agent commercialization.
Here are some of the more than 700 agents already being tracked on AgentOps.ai.
This is a wonderful place to play and is reinventing how we think about B2B software.
We are at a tipping point in the evolution of business software with agents a key catalyst of change.
As Charles Darwin said
““There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” at the end of The Origin of Species
