The Future of AI Monetization: Trends and Challenges with Steven Forth

Steven Forth is Ibbaka's Co-Founder, CEO, and Partner. Ibbaka is a strategic pricing advisory firm.

In this episode, Steven shares the potential commoditization of AI pricing agents, explaining how their replication and standardization could drive down differentiation and value. He explores the interplay between AI-driven sales and buying processes, emphasizing that businesses must consider how AI will influence purchasing decisions. He also touches on the potential of AI to simplify legal tasks.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Learn how AI-powered pricing agents compare to SaaS models and why they might face rapid commoditization in the evolving AI landscape.
• Discover why AI-driven buying decisions are just as important as AI-powered selling strategies—and what that means for the future of pricing.
• Find out how DeepSeek's approach to AI training and pricing could shake up the industry, with potential implications for OpenAI and other major players.

"I think that they need to put themselves in the buyer's shoes and ask themselves, how would I be using AI to make a buying decision?"

- Steven Forth

Topics Covered:

01:23 - Explaining the four types of AI products and how they impact pricing, automation, and value creation

09:51 - Exploring whether AI agents will become commoditized

12:46 - How complex pricing workflows require multiple AI agents working together as a service, rather than a single standalone pricing agent

14:17 - Explaining that differentiated AI agents with better performance will still command higher prices

19:20 - Highlighting how DeepSeek's advancements in post-training optimization and lower pricing could drive broader AI adoption

21:20 - What makes AI agents more prone to commoditization

23:22 - How SaaS solutions are less prone to commoditization than AI agents

26:32 - Suggesting that tasks like real estate conveyance could be automated by AI agents

29:02 - Steven's best pricing advice

Key Takeaways:

"A lot of the use cases for outcome-based pricing or results-based pricing really only become relevant when an action is taken on your behalf. And you can evaluate the value of that action and the success of that action." - Steven Forth

"Are all agents by nature more subject to commoditization than other parts of the ecology, like copilots or service as software or generators? My gut feeling is that there are going to be agents that are highly differentiated because they rely on highly customized underlying language models and highly tuned prompt sequences that would not be easy for someone else to recreate. And that they'll be able to make better decisions." - Steven Forth

"Apart from very specific and narrow cases, I don't think pricing is going to be done by agents. Pricing will be service as software." - Steven Forth

People/Resources Mentioned:

• Grammarly: https://www.grammarly.com
• Copilot: https://copilot.microsoft.com/onboarding
• ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/
• Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co
• Hubspot: https://www.hubspot.com
• FinnAI: https://www.finnai.io/en
• LegalZoom: https://www.legalzoom.com
• Zendesk: https://www.zendesk.com
• Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/
• Pros: https://pros.com
• Vendavo: https://www.vendavo.com
• Zilliant: https://zilliant.com
• Pricefx: https://www.pricefx.com
• Maxio: https://www.maxio.com
• DeepSeek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepSeek

Connect with Steven Forth:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenforth/
• Email: steven@ibbaka.com

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: mark@impactpricing.com