Learn how to enhance value from IT and agentic AI spending under the new consumption pricing model

PwC is innovating solutions to help you evolve your budget and forecast business value with Salesforce.

As more businesses implement AI effectively, human workers will likely benefit from a reduced task load. While integrating AI can be a huge leap forward, allowing businesses to scale while balancing between manual and automated tasks, it also requires new thinking in terms of exactly how we balance those tasks. AI agents in particular are expected to fundamentally reshape how we work, collaborate and create value.

Part of that reshaping involves the usage, and therefore the pricing model, of cloud software, including software that provides agentic AI. In the AI age, it makes sense for cloud software pricing to reflect its actual business value rather than its value per human user. Like many other industry-leading companies, Salesforce has recently made this shift — and we can now see that result benefiting both Salesforce and its customers.

For customers, usage-based pricing has the benefits of offering more flexibility, letting a business start as small as they need to, and then scaling as they grow and their needs change. Since costs are tied to usage, any scaling customers experience in price is often matched by the increased results they would theoretically achieve via their increased usage.

For software and tech companies like Salesforce, charging on a usage basis helps enhance revenue growth within each client without the need to upsell. It also can tie the underlying consumption costs that Salesforce incurs when generating data and AI for their customers directly to their customers’ usage — confirming fair and clear pricing.

You can probably think of several ways in which the shift to a consumption-based pricing model, including the use of agentic AI to assist a fewer number of human users, might impact your business and its financial operations. Going forward, considering consumption as you conceive of and design any implementation or solution can help you to confirm that you are identifying each of the potential impacts and making the ideal choices to keep your consumption effective, clear and trackable.

PwC is currently helping several clients transition to consumption-based pricing using custom tools such as calculators that can be leveraged during your program design and proactive monitoring tools that can work alongside Salesforce’s Digital Wallet, a free management tool that delivers near real-time usage data for your consumption-based Salesforce products. As part of this process, we have been able to identify key points within the development process where planning for consumption model pricing can make the biggest impact on a business.

At many companies, increasing efficiency for financial operations requires planning costs across multiple clouds and service providers, not just Salesforce. But tracking consumption and business value across multiple clouds as you offload processes to them does not have to be a challenge.

For example, using AWS and Salesforce together, PwC can help you strategically implement a zero-ETL system — one that does not rely on inefficient or duplicative data processes.

And now that Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce have expanded their relationship, you can leverage and track spending on both one of the leading cloud providers and one of the leading CRM providers from the AWS Marketplace. Within the Marketplace, unified invoicing helps you get a single perspective on IT expenses and streamline your procedures, and increased product integration allows a single source for data insights, thereby helping deliver smarter service.

PwC can also help you get started with designing or streamlining a process that can effectively leverage multiple cloud costs, including Salesforce. Do you know the ideal use cases in which your business should convert to using agentic AI such as Agentforce? How would you plan for consumption costs so that they can effectively deliver value that is specific to your organization? PwC can help you understand the business value of making these shifts and streamlining your business processes to prepare for consumption-based pricing.