Microsoft exec suggests AI agents will need to buy software licenses, just like employees
16 points by dustyweb
16 points by dustyweb
That reminds me of how QNX developer licenses costed like between $5,000 and $10,000 per seat and when they caught wind of us using build servers, they told us that the build servers need a license as well, and can't just reuse one of the developer's licenses. This is the point where you go "Sooo... Linux and PREEMPT_RT, how much effort is it to port our stack?"
How about saying it how it is instead of beating around the bush?
A company with 20 employees might buy 20 Microsoft 365 licenses today.
This is the outdated model of doing business with us in the future.
If each employee gets five AI agents, and the workforce shrinks to 10 people, that could still mean 50 paid seats.
Layoff 50% of your workforce and pay us with the savings you just made with the layoffs instead. See now you can afford 50 seats of Microslop 365!
Btw they math'ed wrong, it should be 60 seats instead of 50 (10 human + 50 agents).
Why would the humans need the license? You only need to sell (inappropriate GUI) licenses to the bot, the human only needs the license to the prompter
The humans each need a license, plus one license for the agent that draws the short straw and has to generate the Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents we are reliably informed the entire business world relies on. The agents do their work in formats incomprehensible to mere mortals, like YAML, C++26, or UTF-8. Only when they've converged on a final product does that single agent use its license to produce polished, McKinsey-style content using Microsoft 365 for human overlord consumption.
This seems silly for software. I get it for the case of services where someone is spending resources to provide something unique. But local software? We're already at the stage where things blocking us for cost or licence reasons can be reimplemented and it's only going to get easier for bigger applications in the future. Why would people close to development suddenly get interested in buying more software instead?
Charging seat-per-agent would be confusing because it’s hard to define a single agent. If my system prompt changes within a session, is that still the same agent or do I need a new license? What about if I add a tool or skill? With each message? Also what’s a session?
If a company sees a revenue opportunity, they may be more than happy to resolve that “Ship of Theseus” ambiguity in EULAs. But an alternative future is that more platforms being extensively leveraged by agents choose to move to seat + API pricing
Is the notion of «an» agent well-defined enough for that to work?
With per-GPU-core pricing and renting compute, this will again create interesting incentives for renting out too-good-to-be-true services and lying what they are. With counting open sessions (also for multi-tasking humans), this will create interesting incentives for inserting pointless delays.
if AI agents need Microsoft licenses because they "count as employees" then AI agents should also be paying income tax.
The idea of making agents pay per "seat" is a such a backward "horseless carriage" way of thinking. Agents are no different than any kind of integration via API. Just charge per requests. The more you call the software, the more you pay. You know, like any paid API or Cloud service work today. This way you cover everything, from the stupid little python script to the mythical AGI God.
EDIT: and if you sell on-premise software, just use the pricing model of infrastructure stuff like databases, virtualisation, server OS, or any of that. Charge per-core or per node. This way, your pricing scale with the amount of work the agent execute with your software. No matter if its one or one thousand agent making requests.
Charging by usage or by core/socket date back from the mainframe era. We had figured it out in the 60s. A.k.a. before that clueless executive was even alive. Remind me of the Patrick Boyle video about tech bro reinventing simple things like the vending machine or the train...
People can't take this seriously, right? You know, a seller of subscriptions loves a buyer who forgot they're still on autopay. I think they're crossing their fingers hoping millions of yolo agents will each shrug and impulse buy it, then forget and buy it again. Prompt injection as marketing.
Unfortunately for them, the whole team is sharing a single AI agent working working 24/7 and using a single license.
Ha, ha.
And they can pay for them with crypto: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/moonpay-open-sources-the-wallet-layer-for-the-agent-economy-302722116.html