Salesforce willing to lose money on AI agent licenses when customers are locked in

Salesforce's chief revenue officer has said that he is relaxed about the CRM giant losing money on AI agent seat-based licensing in the long term because it will have many more years to "monetize" such customers.

The SaaS vendor has introduced an Agentic Enterprise License Agreement (AELA), a flat, seat-based arrangement that CEO Marc Benioff said was becoming popular among customers. It had previously mooted per-conversation and consumption-based pricing for its AI agent platform, on which it is staking its future.

Speaking at the Barclays 23rd Annual Global Technology Conference, Miguel Milano, president and chief revenue officer, said he expected most of Salesforce's customers to base their plans for "digital labor" on the company's AI agent platform. He promised investors that the company's ability to "monetize" those relationships would be three to four times the business it is doing with such customers in CRM, marketing, and ...