Salesforce willing to lose money on AI agent licenses when customers are locked in
Flat-rate deals may sting now, but vendor expects payback over decades
Salesforce's chief revenue officer has said that he is relaxed about the CRM giant losing money on AI agent seat-based licensing in the long term because it will have many more years to "monetize" such customers.
The SaaS vendor has introduced an Agentic Enterprise License Agreement (AELA), a flat, seat-based arrangement that CEO Marc Benioff said was becoming popular among customers. It had previously mooted per-conversation and consumption-based pricing for its AI agent platform, on which it is staking its future.
Speaking at the Barclays 23rd Annual Global Technology Conference, Miguel Milano, president and chief revenue officer, said he expected most of Salesforce's customers to base their plans for "digital labor" on the company's AI agent platform. He promised investors that the company's ability to "monetize" those relationships would be three to four times the business it is doing with such customers in CRM, marketing, and data analytics, for example.
As such, if a customer wanted to exceed their product usage beyond what is profitable to Salesforce under a flat-rate deal, that would be OK with Milano.
"We take the risk because we want our customers to be successful. There's nothing that I would love [more than] a customer that I price... at $5 million incremental AELA, and the customer deploys so much that all of a sudden, that deal is not profitable for me. If that is not profitable for me, it means that the customer is the happiest customer in the world. And then I have another 20 years to monetize that customer. So I'm not worried about that," he said, admitting that this might be an extreme example of the kind of relationship he imagines.
Milano also said pay-as-you-go deals would be available to customers who want them, but most would like to pre-commit spending on the AI platform.
The promise to "monetize" customers echoes a warning from tech research firm Forrester, which said in an August report that "the era of monetization has begun."
It said that to benefit from AI agent platforms, organizations faced a "monumental" effort in retraining their employees in new workflows. However, such a strategy also "dramatically increases vendor lock-in and the strategic risk of your choice," the analyst warned.
Earlier this year, Benioff said moving customers onto an AI agent platform represented "a very high margin opportunity" for Salesforce.
Last week, the CEO also promised customers would get between three and ten times more value from its products by using its AI platform. ®