So, your procurement team just signed a massive enterprise contract for a new artificial intelligence suite.
They bought a license for every single employee in the building. The sales rep promised it was going to revolutionize your workflows. The chief information officer is popping champagne.
I review enterprise software for a living, and I have some really bad news for you. You did not just buy a revolution. You just got played by the oldest pricing scam in the software industry.
I am talking about the absolute absurdity of per seat pricing in the era of generative intelligence.
Let us look at the actual economics of what just happened. For the last fifteen years, software as a service was predictably sold on a per seat basis. You hired a new account executive, you bought another Salesforce license. You hired a new designer, you bought another Adobe seat. This made perfect logical sense. Software used to be a digital workspace. Every single employee physically needed a login credential to enter that workspace and do their job.
