Salesforce has told investors it is upping prices for AI agent platforms, claiming customers will get between three and ten times the value from investment as it introduces new AI charging models.
In an earnings call with financial analysts, Miguel Milano, Salesforce chief revenue officer, said the SaaS biz is looking for a sharp increase in “monetization” from new AI contracts it is striking with customers, while also promising something in it for the buyers.
AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren’t AI at all
READ MORE
“[We’re] talking about 3x, 4x the ability to multiply the monetization on customers because, by the way, they’re getting 3 or 4x or 10x more value from our products,” he said.
Forrester has already questioned the assumptions on which such claims are made. In an October report, the research firm said 25 percent of planned AI spending for next year would be put off until 2027 as financial rigor slows production deployments.
“The disconnect between the inflated promises of AI vendors and the value created for enterprises will force a market correction. As demand slips, utilization will lag, cost per useful inference will remain high, and providers will chase fill rate with discounts and oversized commitments,” the report said.
It had already warned that lock-in from the largest vendors would see them end discounting and push high-margin AI products.
The issue of how enterprise software vendors charge for AI is still a live one. In August, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was questioned by analysts about how it would increase revenue if customers were cutting headcount as a result of AI’s productivity gains. He said Salesforce was considering consumption and AI agent conversation-based pricing and promised a “very high margin opportunity.”
Salesforce introduced its Agentic Enterprise License Agreement (AELA) in October to offer a flexible menu of options and reusable credits in a single package, but on seat-based pricing.
On this week’s earning call, Benioff said: “When we first started with Agentforce, we were talking about [charging] so much per conversation. It was this type of pricing, maybe transaction-based pricing, usage-based pricing, but customers have pushed for more flexibility.”
Milano said: “People talk about seat-based versus consumption-based pricing. The reality is there are a lot of customers that want seat-based because seat-based gives you the predictability.”
While he maintained that human numbers are also going to increase in most deployments, Milano said that where companies had over-ordered or were cutting headcount, users could get credits for their licenses. “If they decrease in some areas, you redeploy them. You can [turn] that payment to Salesforce into credits, into an AELA or into a seat-based license. So we have the full flexibility,” he said.
Milano said Salesforce is also increasing prices for “our core clouds” while most customers are increasing seats, “which is exciting.”
Perhaps for Salesforce and its shareholders, who were told this week they are getting a $0.416 per share dividend that is payable on January 8, 2026.
The comments followed Salesforce’s Q3 results [PDF] for the three months ended October 31, in which it reported revenue of $10.3 billion, up 9 percent from a year earlier. It also increased revenue estimates for the remainder of the current financial year. ®