The agents are coming for your pricing model

Sample issue, The GTM Brief, week of 9 June 2026

Pricing is quietly becoming the main go-to-market battleground, and most teams are treating it as a back-office setting. Agentic AI is pulling apart the logic of seat-based software pricing, and the teams that move to value or outcome pricing this year are the ones who will hold their margins through the next one.

The big signal

The capital is turning first. PitchBook's Q1 2026 read on software is blunt, "the flat-rate era is ending", with venture activity increasingly favoring companies built on alternative pricing models. The catalyst is agentic AI. Carrie Osman, founder and CEO of Cruxy, puts it plainly, seat-based pricing is "on borrowed time", because agentic AI exposes a basic flaw in how software captures and monetizes value. You cannot meaningfully price a non-human, infinitely scalable agent by the seat. The infrastructure is already forming around the shift. At Money20/20 Europe, Airwallex launched Airwallex Billing, a usage and consumption billing suite aimed squarely at AI and SaaS. When the finance plumbing gets rebuilt for a new model, the model has already arrived.

Three more moves worth your attention

1. Capital is flooding back into infrastructure. PitchBook reports venture deal value in infrastructure SaaS jumped roughly 114% quarter over quarter in Q1 2026. If your product sits on a legacy stack with rigid pricing, you are now competing with well-funded, agentic-native rivals.
2. The AI execution gap is widening. McKinsey's 10th global B2B Pulse survey, drawing on around 4,000 decision-makers, found the digital capabilities firms built over a decade are now just the price of admission, and leaders are about twice as likely to have fully implemented generative AI. Basic enablement is table stakes now, the edge is in operationalizing it.
3. Agentic execution hit production. ADvendio launched a specialised agentic AI workforce for advertising on 8 June 2026. Agents are entering core go-to-market functions, so charging only for human access leaves value on the table.

Your move this week

Run a 60-minute value-metric audit. Get your head of product and a lead seller in a room, and list every core action a user takes in your platform, human or AI. Cross-reference each against your current pricing metric, seats, storage, whatever it is, and ask one question for each, does this metric track the value the customer actually receives. Where the answer is no, you have found a pressure point. Write down the top three. That list is the opening agenda for your pricing overhaul.

The shift is already underway. The only choice left is whether you price for it before your competitors do.