For the last two decades, the playbook for growing and monetizing software has been deeply human-centric. Pricing tiers, interactive pricing visualizers, and discounting strategies were carefully engineered around behavioral psychology, relying on concepts like the compromise effect to gently nudge human buyers toward a middle tier, promotion, or ideal price. Kyle Poyar, growth advisor and founder of Growth Unhinged, points out that historically, pricing optimization has heavily relied on behavioral psychology, leaning heavily into understanding how to design experiences that align with the nuances of human decision-making.

But now, a profound shift is underway, and it’s one where the primary user (and increasingly, the buyer) of software infrastructure is no longer human.

In our recent webinar on How Agents Are Changing Monetization, Scott Woody, Head of Stripe’s Revenue Suite, and Kyle Poyar, creator of Growth Unhinged, unpacked this rise in autonomous agent activity. In companies and products like Stripe and Metronome, agentic deployments are scaling at blistering speeds. As Scott observed, "We're going from 0% agents to 50% agents in the course of a single calendar year."

When the entity clicking your buttons, provisioning your infrastructure, and evaluating your software operates autonomously inside workflows 24/7, the traditional growth playbook breaks down. To survive this shift, companies have to entirely rethink how they position, package, and sell to protect the value they deliver.

Growth when the buyer isn't human

The optimization approaches that have been traditionally used to appeal to human decision-making may be almost entirely irrelevant to an AI agent. As Scott discussed, it’s likely that agents don’t care if a plan costs 99¢ versus a dollar. They don’t get overwhelmed by choice, nor do they seek the comfort of a simplified matrix because they’re focused on the goal they’ve been given, and not on reducing any cognitive load.

Instead, it seems likely that agents will thrive on maximum complexity in order to optimize toward their goals. 

"Agents prefer maximum complexity in pricing and packaging so they can design a pricing and packaging that accomplishes whatever goal set that they have." —Scott Woody, 7:15 

Unless told otherwise, agents will prioritize output quality, programmatic reliability, and speed, which means that their goals are rarely centered solely around a budget. If a vendor can deliver a provably faster result for a fraction of a penny more, it’s much more likely that an agent will choose it.

This also fundamentally changes AI search optimization and programmatic discovery. If your pricing variables are locked behind an interactive pricing visualizer or hidden in an unstructured format that obscures the actual pricing, LLMs and autonomous agents may exclude you from their dataset. As Kyle warned during the discussion: 

"If your pricing isn't transparent, you could be dropped off the list entirely for that LLM." —Kyle Poyar, 11:22

To make sure your pricing is discoverable, Kyle recommends publishing clean markdown files of pricing tables in your documentation so LLMs can easily read how your pricing scales.

The great unbundling: Platform vs. infrastructure pass-through

As companies race to adapt, the market is experiencing a massive wave of credit- and token-based pricing models. According to Kyle’s newly released State of B2B Monetization report, 29% of software companies have already adopted an AI credit or token model, and another 33% plan to follow suit within the next 6–12 months.

The tough part here is that early iterations of these models often suffer from a significant structural flaw: it’s not unusual that they’re priced strictly on a cost-plus basis to protect against volatile LLM hosting costs, which then yields lower gross margins. Over the long term, pure token pass-through is a race to the bottom. If a business model relies entirely on marking up API tokens, the business is putting itself at risk of being cut out of the deal entirely due to commoditization.

So instead of pure cost-plus models, a clear pattern is emerging: the unbundling of the platform from the fuel. Kyle compares this to a ‘Costco model,’ where the infrastructure pass-through is treated as a low-margin utility, while focusing the core commercial conversation on the unique, high-margin value of the software platform.

Positioning was also something Kyle noted as critically important. If you just lean on cheaper utility pricing as your core value proposition, you easily back yourself into the corner of being viewed solely as a commodity, rather than a product with a unique value-add.

Scott agreed, with a caution that a 50% gross margin on pure token pass-through is a temporary anomaly of the "wild west of token world." Forward-thinking platforms like Clay are separating their platform access fees from their token utilization costs. By treating infrastructure pass-through as a low-margin utility, companies can encourage unconstrained adoption while safely monetizing the high-margin architectural value of their platform.

The death of the rigid seat license

Once the golden goose of B2B SaaS, the per-seat license and its associated metrics can create a massive expansion bottleneck in an ecosystem where one agent can run thousands of automated workflows simultaneously.

As part of this, Kyle highlighted a comment that Satya Nadella made in a recent Microsoft earnings call:

“Any per-user business of ours, whether it’s productivity, coding, security, will become a per-user and usage business.” Satya Nadella, FY26 Q3 earnings call

In Kyle’s view, a seat now is just entitlement to some consumption, and in Nadella’s mind, the value isn't in the seat—the value is in the consumption. The seat is becoming just an easy way to sell the value to a CFO.

It’s also notable how dramatically investor sentiment has shifted alongside this realization. Historically, entering a growth-stage meeting without an 80% gross margin meant leaving without a term sheet. Today, a hybrid model combining predictable subscription baselines with variable usage elements is much more heavily favored by investors because it proves that a company's product is actually operating in the "token path" of generative workflows. In this world, coming to the table with an 80% gross margin will raise eyebrows and leave you without a term sheet.

While hybrid billing aligns with value delivery, it also introduces an immediate challenge: explainability. Mixing seat fees, consumption tiers, and credits means that bills become harder for human procurement teams to digest. To counter this friction, Kyle emphasized that companies have to invest in better sales enablement, explicit pricing documentation, calculators, and in-app usage visibility to help customers get comfortable with what consumption means within your product ecosystem.

The headless imperative

Ultimately, the rise of the agentic workforce is steering software toward a headless future. If an agent completely bypasses your beautiful UI to engage directly with APIs, your software essentially becomes an orchestration engine.

Scott’s take is that you cannot resist the headless wave:

"Headless is the native way that agents will want to work with things . . . It’s a UX shift where the agent basically gives you zero credit for a really great sticky UX because it's way smarter than a human . . . it will basically arbitrate or arbitrage you down to zero." —Scott Woody, 42:00

Blocking programmatic access to save legacy seat licenses will only result in losing market share to more nimble competitors. The path forward requires engineering durable, compounding value layers like unique data network effects or regulatory moats on top of raw data access.

The companies that win this next era of monetization will use their pricing as a strategic asset to capture market share. It's time to build monetization systems engineered for machine speed.

To learn more about how leading AI and SaaS companies are adapting their pricing models, watch the full webinar on How Agents Are Changing Monetization.

Are you ready to see if your business is ready for the next era of buyers? Get in touch with our team. We’re here to help you evolve your pricing for the AI era.