Around 130 companies were asked some version of “is AI eating your business?” and said no. Almost all of enterprise software sits here — Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Adobe, SAP, Atlassian — swatting the seat-compression question away like it’s beneath them.
Now, none of this is secret. The denials are in the prepared remarks for anyone to read. And the pricing changes are in the press releases for anyone to read. The interesting thing is that they contradict each other. Almost every one of these companies is, at the same time, tearing out per-seat pricing and replacing it with usage-based pricing.
Sit with the logic. If your software is sold per employee, and AI agents are about to do those employees’ jobs, then per-seat revenue is the exact thing AI threatens. A company that genuinely believed AI was harmless would have no reason to rebuild its entire pricing model on a deadline. When a company’s words and its pricing point in opposite directions, the pricing is the more honest signal — because it costs something.
https://autonomousresearchcorp.com/research/ai-revenue-headwind