AI costs heat forcing vendors to rethink pricing: Pegasystems executive

As enterprises move beyond AI experimentation, the focus is shifting from deploying more AI agents to controlling costs and demonstrating return on investment (ROI), prompting enterprise software companies to rethink both products and pricing.

US-based enterprise software company Pegasystems, whose customers include many of the world's largest banks, is betting that outcome-based pricing, rather than conventional per-token billing, will drive its next phase of growth. The company said traditional token-based AI deployments can be 10-20 times more expensive in some use cases than workflow-led architectures that minimise token consumption.

"We've shifted from asking, 'How much AI can we use and how many agents can we deploy?' to asking, 'What's the real value we're getting out of this?'" Don Schuerman, global CTO and vice president, marketing & technology strategy at Pegasystems, told ET.


Rather than allowing AI agents to execute entire business processes autonomously, Pega is using its AI workflow design platform, Blueprint, to redesign enterprise workflows during the planning stage before deploying smaller, task-specific AI agents at runtime. The approach helps enterprises improve governance while keeping AI costs predictable, Schuerman said. India sits at the centre of that strategy for Pega. The company employs 1,966 people in the country, with more than 50% of its global developers based in India.