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.

Adobe is investing heavily in generative AI and has begun to signal how it will approach pricing. It is taking an incremental approach. Price remain anchored in a per seat price, but plans are becoming more flexible, and more expensive!

NRR dynamics differ depending on market stage. In markets that are being disrupted and where new use cases are emerging you can see high Net Revenue Retention and high churn occur together. This post summarizes a key insight from the forthcoming Peakspan Ibbaka NRR Survey for 2024.

Conventional approaches to pricing are not fit for purpose when it comes to pricing generative AI applications for B2B. A new process is needed. Ibbaka is proposing generative pricing, a mashup (or concept blend) of dynamic pricing and value based pricing.

Discounting is a fact of life for most B2B companies. As pricing models become more complex and come to include usage or consumption components, what should get discounted? We use scenario planning to think through this question.

Salesforce has announced that it will use consumption pricing for its AI agents going forward. Why is Salesforce taking this approach? What are the implications for other Vertical AI companies? Results of our LinkedIn poll.

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.

Ibbaka had the pleasure of hosting a roundtable discussion on Monetizing Generative AI, featuring two industry luminaries: Michael Mansard from Zuora and Kyle Poyar from OpenView Partners. Generative AI is going to transform how we build B2B applications, how we configure them, how we move to dynamic configuration, and all of that is going to have a huge impact on both monetization and pricing.

OpenAI's o1 models are getting a lot of attention. They are a phase change for how we work with generativeAI. OpenAI has also shared how it will approach pricing of this first version of reasoning models. Reasoning tokens. What are the implications for generative AI pricing generally?

OpenAI has released o1, it next generation approach to generative AI reasoning and problem solving. If you were OpenAI, how would you price this innovation? We summarize the results of a flash poll, give some analysis and provide our own recommendation.

Most companies monetizing generative AI are using hybrid pricing models where they combine more than one pricing metric. You can see that in the survey we are running to prepare for the Sept. 19 roundtable on monetizing generative AI. What metrics tend to be used together? We ran the data through a Leiden algorithm to find the clusters.