Salesforce opts for seat-based AI licensing as customers demand predictability

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff last week came closer to answering a multibillion-dollar question when he said seat-based pricing – with some caveats – was becoming the norm for its AI agents after flirting with pricing based on consumption and per-conversation payments.

While there is much debate about how users will get money back from investing in AI agents, the stakes are also high when it comes to how they pay for them. Gartner has forecast that agentic AI could drive around 30 percent of enterprise application software revenue by 2035, surpassing $450 billion, up from 2 percent in 2025.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/12/ai_agents_salesforce_pricing/