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In a recent episode of the Mostly Growth podcast, Metronome CEO Scott Woody shared his thoughts on what happens to pricing in a future where the buyer is no longer human. The Metronome team elaborated on Scott’s perspective, exploring what the end-state of agent-driven purchasing might look like.
They covered what happens to AI credits, what teams should be thinking about now, and whether pricing and billing infrastructure will hold up when the buyer is an agent. Read more on how agents are forcing a rethink of monetization.
👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups.
I’m running the second annual State of B2B Monetization survey to see how tech companies are adapting their pricing models in the age of AI. If you’re passionate about this topic, too, please consider taking the 5-minute survey. It’ll make us all smarter. The results will be shared back in this newsletter in May.
Your next customer might be an AI agent, whether you’re ready or not.
This could sound a bit like science fiction. Some of the early experiments, including Walmart’s agentic commerce partnership with OpenAI, haven’t panned out (they’re now testing a new model where Walmart’s AI agent gets embedded directly within ChatGPT).
But this isn’t as far off as it might seem.
AI already recommends which products to buy. It helps buyers negotiate with sellers. If you're building an app with an AI agent like Claude Code, you're primed to delegate at least some decision making to a trusted agent. And now AI agents are getting their own credit cards!
Some signs that agentic commerce is coming, even for B2B products:
Ramp introduced Agent Cards (in beta), positioned as a safe way for agents to spend money. AI agents get a tokenized card tied to a specific transaction. Human users (and companies) can set their own policies including spending limits, approval workflows, and expense category restrictions.
Mastercard and Google partnered on an open standard to verify AI agent transactions. This is meant to help verify whether a human actually authorized the purchase, whether the agent followed instructions exactly, and how to prove it.
Stripe reflected on six months since launching its Agentic Commerce Protocol with OpenAI. The leading takeaway: “In practice, getting ‘ingestion-ready’ product data is what determines whether you show up reliably across agent surfaces.”
Vercel expanded the ability to buy via command in your CLI including credits, add-ons, subscriptions, and domains. This is the plumbing to buy as part of an agentic workflow.
Prospects are showing up ready to buy, spending less time on your website and more time in AI answer engines. Zero-click purchases feel like an inevitability, likely beginning with developer tools and commodity products. The question is: will you be ready when AI agents start buying?
Your pricing was designed for humans (and that could be a problem)
Humans like simple, easy to understand pricing.
We get overwhelmed by having too many choices and would prefer perhaps three or four packages. Product jargon goes over our head, and we like clear solutions that address what we’re trying to accomplish with the product. Predictable, flat rate pricing reduces our anxiety about buying. Oh, and we love feeling like we got a deal.
Tech companies responded by keeping pricing relatively opaque. Only 50% of B2B tech companies publish their pricing online, according to my 2025 State of B2B Monetization report. Even among those who do have transparent pricing, enterprise plans tend to be gatekept behind a “Contact sales” or “Custom quote” CTA.
Pricing pages were never really optimized for buying anyway; they’re mostly marketing content to encourage prospects to take the next step.
AI agents don’t want to contact sales. Best case scenario, they’ll guess at what they think pricing looks like based on what they can find online. Worst case scenario: your “contact sales” CTA means you’re dropped from the agent’s shortlist of products altogether.
Agents are no longer tricked by behavioral pricing moves like charm pricing ($9.99) or the deal effect, either. Their evaluation will likely be structured and rational based on a set of decision making criteria.
This means that AI agents need content and details to make an evaluation. In fact, the more detail, the better. AI agents have endless compute power to navigate complex pricing and find a global optimum.
What AI agent buyers might like when it comes to pricing:
Complete transparency
Detailed and structured pricing documentation
Full ability to customize the scope of products and usage
Being able to set a maximum budget
Data on performance and outcomes for that budget
What you can do right now to prepare for AI agent buyers
Answer engine optimization (AEO) has become the new SEO. Pricing needs to follow suit, and your pricing needs its own AEO makeover.
Here are eight things you can do right now to prepare for AI agent buying.
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