Over the past few months, founders and pricing leaders joined us at Stripe Sessions in San Francisco and Stripe Tour stops in London, Paris, and Berlin to discuss how AI is transforming the economics of software. Across these conversations, a common theme kept surfacing: the revenue playbook that built the last generation of successful companies is breaking down. Leaders are already adapting by speeding up pricing iteration and preparing for the rise of the nonhuman buyer. Here are five shifts we’re seeing. Always-on pricing iteration requires new ways of working
From left to right: Scott Woody, CEO of Metronome; Celine Plante, Head of Deal Operations at ElevenLabs; Aisling O’Reilly, Head of Pricing at Fin
In her first year at Lovable, Head of Growth Elena Verna made 10 pricing changes. That pace would have been unusual just a few years ago. But for AI-native companies, pricing has quickly become something they need to revisit more than once a year, or even once a quarter. Products change too quickly for pricing to stay fixed for long, and companies are still learning what resonates with customers. Across our conversations in San Francisco, Paris, London, and Berlin, leaders made it clear that internal processes must change in order to achieve the necessary pace of pricing iteration. They found traditional pricing committees too slow and unwieldy to keep up. At Stripe Tour London, Aisling O’Reilly, Fin’s head of pricing, described the “chaos” of the team’s previous large pricing committee meetings. With 20 people weighing in, there were too many stakeholders and too few decisions made. She and other AI leaders described how they moved to more streamlined processes—or even a single pricing owner.
