Microsoft is rethinking how it charges for software — and it’s all about bots.
CEO Satya Nadella said in an episode of the “Dwarkesh Podcast,” published on Thursday, that Microsoft is reimagining how it prices software as AI becomes part of everyday work.
Instead of charging “per user,” Nadella said the company is thinking about “per agent” — a reference to AI systems that can perform tasks and make decisions autonomously.
Rather than building software solely for a human worker, Microsoft is shifting its focus toward provisioning software for an AI coworker.
“Our business, which today is an end-user tools business, will become essentially an infrastructure business in support of agents doing work,” Nadella said.
“The way to think about the per-user business is not just per user, it’s per agent,” he added.
Nadella’s comments reflect a broader transformation underway across the industry, as AI systems begin to use software instead of merely being powered by it — and companies are rethinking how to charge customers.
Business Insider’s Alistair Barr reported in April that software companies like ServiceNow are testing usage-based billing tied to AI workloads. As AI tools consume more compute with each query or inference, companies are finding it harder to sustain traditional flat “per-seat” licenses.
“When it goes beyond what we can credibly afford, we have to have some kind of meter,” Bill McDermott, the CEO of ServiceNow, previously told Business Insider.
In the enterprise world, the same shift is underway. Deloitte and EY launched agentic AI platforms in March, where autonomous systems generate analyses, schedule work, and communicate with clients. Rather than charging based on the hours or human resources spent on a project, EY’s global managing partner for growth and innovation, Raj Sharma, said these new models could lead to a “service-as-a-software” approach, where clients pay for outcomes delivered by AI agents.
Nadella told the “Dwarkesh Podcast” that under this vision, the company’s services, such as its Microsoft 365 suite, would provide the core workspace for AI agents.
“All the stuff we built underneath M365 still is going to be very relevant. You need some place to store it, some place to do archival, some place to do discovery, some place to manage all of these activities, even if you’re an AI agent,” he said.
The new infrastructure business is going to “grow faster than the number of users,” he added.
Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced a pay-as-you-go pricing model for its AI agents. The metered system sits on top of a free Copilot chat experience for Microsoft 365 users, allowing companies to pay based on the amount of work their AI agents perform.
Other tech companies like Anthropic charge customers by usage — pricing its Claude models per million tokens processed. Google also applies a similar pay-as-you-go structure for its Gemini API.