Satya Nadella explains how Microsoft is rethinking software pricing for the AI era (www.businessinsider.com)

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company is rethinking software pricing for an era of “agentic” AI, shifting from traditional per-user licenses to billing “per agent” — meaning software provisioned for autonomous AI coworkers that perform tasks and make decisions. Nadella described Microsoft’s transformation from an end-user tools business into an infrastructure provider that supports these agents, with Microsoft 365 remaining the core workspace for storage, archival, discovery and management even when work is done by AI. He noted the new infrastructure business will “grow faster than the number of users,” highlighting a move toward metered, usage-based models. The change reflects a broader industry trend as AI workloads consume variable compute and inference costs that flat per-seat licenses can’t credibly cover. Microsoft already offers pay-as-you-go pricing for its agents on top of a free Copilot chat layer, while vendors like Anthropic and Google price by usage (e.g., tokens processed) and enterprise firms such as ServiceNow, Deloitte and EY are testing outcome- or workload-based billing. For AI/ML teams and product managers, this means designing agents that are cost-efficient, instrumenting metering/observability, and planning backend storage and governance to support billed agent activity rather than simply counting human seats.