I will give you the most direct, unfiltered answer you are going to hear on this platform: You are letting legacy SaaS vendors tax your entire workforce by paying for empty chairs.
If your procurement team just signed an enterprise AI contract that charges you a "per-user" or "per-seat" monthly fee, you just got scammed by a completely obsolete pricing model. And the worst part is, the vendors know exactly what they are doing.
Let’s break down the actual economics of what is happening in the B2B AI market right now. For the last fifteen years, software as a service (SaaS) was predictably sold on a per-seat basis. You hired a new account executive, you bought another $150/month Salesforce license. You hired a new designer, you bought another Adobe Creative Cloud seat. This made perfect logical sense because software used to be a digital workspace. Every single employee physically needed a login credential to enter that workspace and perform their daily tasks.
But generative AI does not function like a CRM or a design canvas. It functions as an on-demand reasoning engine.
The analytics from my recent software audits across multiple Fortune 500 companies show a brutal, undeniable reality: AI adoption in any given enterprise is heavily, almost violently, skewed. The distribution is rarely the 80/20 rule; it is closer to 90/10.
Roughly 10% to 15% of your workforce will become true power users. These are the employees who actually take the time to learn prompt engineering. They will hit the Large Language Model (LLM) hundreds of times a day. They will build complex, multi-step workflows. They will automate their data entry, generate massive reports, and extract genuine, measurable value from the system.
The other 85%? Their usage graph is a flatline. They will log in once during the mandatory HR onboarding day. They will type a lazy prompt like "write a polite email to my boss about taking Friday off." The AI will spit out something completely generic and robotic. The employee will roll their eyes, close the browser tab, and literally never touch the software again for the rest of the fiscal year.
When you pay $30, $40, or $50 a month for an enterprise AI license for all 5,000 of your employees, you are heavily subsidizing the vendor's profit margins. You are paying tens of thousands of dollars every single month for compute power that is absolutely never being consumed. It is the gym membership business model—where the gym only stays profitable because 80% of the people who pay the monthly fee never actually show up to use the treadmills.
Think about the sheer economic irony of this situation. The entire sales pitch of artificial intelligence is that it drastically reduces the manual labor required to execute a business process. An AI agent is supposed to allow one mid-level financial analyst to perform the data processing work of three junior analysts.
If the software is actively designed to reduce the number of humans you need to throw at a problem, why on earth are you allowing the vendor to charge you based on your human headcount? It makes zero economic sense. It is a legacy pricing model duct-taped onto a revolutionary technology because vendors are terrified of losing their predictable recurring revenue.
Let me give you a concrete example of how much money this is wasting. I recently consulted for a mid-sized marketing and PR agency with about 400 employees. A major AI vendor quoted them $144,000 a year for "premium seat licenses" so their entire staff could use a proprietary text-generation and summarization interface. The CIO was ready to sign it purely out of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).
I told them to freeze the contract. Instead, we spent exactly one week building a custom, very basic internal web interface that hooked directly into the API endpoints of OpenAI and Anthropic. The team gets the exact same conversational capabilities. They get the exact same underlying intelligence.
The actual cost? About $600 a month in usage-based API billing. That is $7,200 a year.
When you pay per-seat for an enterprise AI wrapper, you are paying a 2,000% markup for a generic user interface and a login screen.
The smart companies, the ones who actually understand cloud economics, are flat-out refusing these contracts. They demand consumption-based pricing. They tell the vendor they want to pay per token generated, per query executed, or per active monthly user. If an employee doesn't generate a token, the company doesn't pay a dime.
Stop letting tech companies tax your entire organization for a tool that only a fraction of them know how to use. AI scales with compute, not with human logins. Tell your vendor you want to pay for the engine fuel, not the passenger seats.
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