Agentic technology or AI agents are one of the emerging themes for 2025. What functions can be packaged as agents? How will agents be priced? Integrations are a useful case study. Agentic AI approaches to integration offer more value than automation and will likely take over the highest value applications.

Edward Wong is taking on a new role at Ibbaka as Manager of Research and Community. In this post he talks about what the role means to him and the contribution he wants to make to Ibbaka, our customers and the wider value community.

The rapid of evolution of B2B SaaS and generative AI mean we need new ways to chart and navigate a changing environment. Ibbaka is responding by upgrading its investment in research and community. We are adding research reports and generating value models for many solutions based on publicly available information.

Amazon is making some big plays as it tries to establish a growth flywheel for AWS in the generative AI era. This includes offering its own chips as alternatives to Nvidia, offering its own models, and supporting the idea that no one model will or should win. Amazon’s pricing for its own models is generally cheaper than the alternatives. How will this impact packaging and pricing in 2025? We offer some suggestions.

Karen Chiang has become the Chief Value Officer for Ibbaka. In this role she is responsible for how we deliver value to our customers around the value cycle and for ensuring we deliver a high V2C (Value to Customer) to all the companies on the Ibbaka platform.

In a world where companies are transforming their offers and finding new ways to compete the Chief Value Officer (CVO) is emerging as a key role. Having a CVO is in your own and your customer’s interests. Ibbaka welcomes Karen Chiang, a co-founder, as CVO.

Is customer support the killer app for B2B generative AI? We have some early results from the AI Monetization in 2025 survey that suggest widespread adoption of this class of solutions. This is also where we are seeing the strongest evidence for outcome based pricing. Will the success of customer support cascade over into other B2B applications?

One way to think about cybersecurity is as a form of insurance. What lessons can be taken from insurance pricing for cybersecurity solutions? We present a concept blend that suggests a new approach to cybersecurity pricing and advocate for a shared framework for cybersecurity modeled on the insurance industry’s ACORD framework.

What ethical issues come up when one uses AI to inform pricing? As adoption of generative AI based applications starts to take off it is time to put in place plans to address and mitigate ethical issues such as transparency, bias, availability and environmental impact. This is part of an AI pricing strategy.

Outcome or results based pricing is a dominant theme in B2B SaaS these days. But can cybersecurity companies leverage this? How does one price for what you prevent happening? Cybersecurity pricing will evolve over the next decade to use outcome based pricing where possible.

Good pricing requires good data, and one place that data comes from is market research. But what kind of research? Begin with a value model and quantify it with qualitative research and data analysis. Model your costs and test willingness to pay. And don’t forget to see what the competition is up to!

AI agents are emerging as a standard way to deliver AI functionality, especially in B2B. This has been underlined by Salesforce’s recent Agentforce announcements. Agent pricing is evolving from inputs and number of agents to actions and outcomes. This evolution is framing how we think about pricing generativeAI.

The customer value manager will play a key role in future SaaS. Going beyond what customer success, sales or pricing do, this role is accountable for ensuring that customers are getting value and that the vendor is getting paid appropriately. Ambitious young leaders should aspire to this role.

There have been large investments in AI since the release of ChatGPT 3.5 back in November 2022. VC firms have poured money into startups and existing firms have shifted R&D priorities to implement AI-based functionality. We are now seeing the emergence of second generation generative AI apps for B2B and new approaches to pricing. In the second edition of this survey we ask about shifting attitudes towards AI and emerging monetization paradigms.

Ibbaka conducted a survey to help inform the AI Monetization Roundtable with Michael Mansard from Zuora and Kyle Poyar from Growth Unhinged. The survey results are shared here. Key insights include (i) Pricing approaches for horizontal and vertical applications are diverging sharply , (ii) the most common approach to pricing is value based and (iii) The B2B SaaS community is divided on the future impact of generative AI.

Value-based selling has become a cornerstone strategy for many businesses. Executing this strategy effectively without a robust, detailed, validated, and configurable value proposition presents significant challenges. Central to overcoming these challenges is the development and utilization of value models. These models are essential for articulating the unique value a product or service offers and ensuring alignment with customer needs.

Second generation generative AI applications are appearing on the market and with that is coming a change in pricing. First generation applications tended to copy existing pricing models, but now that buyers and sellers are becoming more familiar with generative AI generative pricing is moving from consumption to hybrid and generative approaches.

What were the key findings from the PeakSpan Ibbaka NRR Survey for 2024? There is a growing cluster of disruptive companies with emergent patterns. Some companies in this cluster have the unexpected pattern of high churn with high revenue expansion. Dedicated teams responsible for expansion revenue are outperforming. There are early indications that Machine to Machine companies will have strong NRR performance. Packaging patterns have an impact on NRR performance.

AI agents are emerging as a standard way to deliver AI functionality, especially in B2B. This has been underlined by Salesforce’s recent Agentforce announcements. Agent pricing is evolving from inputs and number of agents to actions and outcomes. This evolution is framing how we think about pricing generativeAI.

This is the second year that PeakSpan and Ibbaka have collaborated to understand benchmarks and best practices in B2B SaaS. Continuity is important because it allows us to see trends in the data. The report documents the disruption being caused in B2B SaaS by generative AI.