What type of AI Solutions will we see in 2025?

Ibbaka released an interesting report, "AI Monetization in 2025 Report," which can be downloaded from their website. The Ibbaka team is a great educator and content developer on software pricing-related topics, and I have been following their work and webinars for quite a while now.

The monetization report, released in January 2025, highlights several important trends that any software vendor should consider. The AI space and pricing models, especially for AI-related solutions, can differ greatly from the more traditional SaaS pricing models.

The report provides the following key insights:

🎯Customer success agents are the killer app for B2B AI with more than 50 percent of respondents saying they are adopting.

🎯Four packaging and monetization are coalescing: agents, co-pilots, generators, and service as software - communicating value and pricing will be easiest within one of these patterns.

🎯Sustaining and disruptive applications are both getting traction, but sustaining innovations dominate - sustaining innovations generally use conventional pricing (like per user) and act by improving existing value drivers.

🎯Flexible pricing models are winning - this could be some form of outcome-based pricing like Intercom or transferable credits like Box.

The ibbaka team conducted a LinkedIn poll in December 2024 to determine which pattern people thought would dominate in 2024. The poll was shared across several sizable LinkedIn groups. The four patterns that the report portrays are the following:

The report defines the patterns as follows:

➡️Agents - that take actions and complete specific tasks

➡️Co-pilots - to stand beside people ready to assist

➡️Generators - to create new content and ideas

➡️Services as Software - as various services become scalable through software

The agents, co-pilots, and generators are self-explanatory, but the Services as Software is an interesting addition to what people think will happen within the AI technology advancement. The report explains the Services as Software with the following statement:

Service as Software is a more holistic approach that combines generators, agents and in some cases co-pilots to replace professional services provided by skilled humans with AIs. Accounting and legal services are often used as examples, but virtually all services are candidates for disruption.

I believe we will be seeing more aggressive development in many different services where AI will take over some of the basic functions of what humans are doing today. Professional services organizations are aggressively redefining their purpose and business model as some of the tasks that especially junior consultants are doing, will be driven by AI processes and AI agents.

Outsourcing to low-cost countries will change as AI can do some of the tasks that have been shipped to these countries. As of this, outsourcing organizations will also need to redefine what business they want to be in going forward.

The report also discusses Value and Price Metric concerning AI, and the following table is a snapshot of how each of these AI emergent packaging patterns will be viewed concerning value and price metrics:

The report lays out nicely how the different packaging patterns will behave from different dimensions:

⭐Does the AI actively make decisions and act on the environment, or does it sit beside a human who makes the decisions and takes action?

⭐Is the AI only engaged under specific conditions, or is it always active?

The types of packaging patterns suggest that organizations will have different pricing models depending on the use case.

The report discusses the relationship between value, price, and cost. Most new-generation applications, whether agents, co-pilots, or generators, need to be priced at a level that covers this cost, which means they need to generate much more value than the underlying models alone. According to the report, if the customer does not see value in the solution, buyers will access the models directly and build internal AI teams. This is already happening in larger organizations.

The report lists several well-known organizations and their AI pricing models, such as Box, Salesforce, Intercom, and Zendesk. Some of these have outcome-based pricing models, such as Zendesk.

The report also eight different packaging patterers for AI and they are as follows:

🎯One Big Package

🎯Independent Modules

🎯Platform + Extensions

🎯Menu Options

🎯Tiered (Good-Better-Best)

🎯Agent

🎯Freemium

🎯Marketplace

🎯API Integrator

🎯Data Feed Manager

🎯Tierd (Good-Better-Best) + Extensions

🎯Family of Agents

At the end of the day, it is all about value capture and what the customer is willing to pay for the solution. I have written several LinkedIn Newsletter articles on pricing, especially concerning AI, and I feel that every software vendor should be heavily invested in understanding how AI will impact their existing solution or a net new solution that they are building. The underlying cost model can surprise the vendor even if the latest reports state that due to the pricing decrease by the large AI providers, the impact on the cost models has been less than expected. It is another story with the new OpenAI o1 model due to the following reasons:

⭐The per token cost is higher.

⭐OpenAI o1 generates Reasoning Tokens (in some cases a lot of reasoning tokens) .

⭐Reasoning Tokens are priced at the same price as output tokens, which OpenAI prices higher than Input Tokens.

I strongly suggest you download the report from the ibbaka website, read it carefully, reflect on it, and consider how it might impact your business.

If you are a business that creates AI solutions, I would love to hear how you manage pricing and if you have identified a pricing model that works well for you.

Yours,

Dr. Petri I. Salonen

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