Pricing AI is proving a challenge

Chief information officers say that despite the increasing prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, companies have yet to establish a way of charging for them as they seek to make the tools cheap enough that people want to buy them but expensive enough to cover costs. While vendors have typically used monthly subscriptions, some are looking at different models in an attempt to gain more users and more adoption, including per use payments and plans that allow enterprises to toggle their spend minimums. Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at Work for Microsoft, says: “A per user per month charge can sometimes be difficult for them if they’re trying to go to broad scale because they’re just not sure how to value something.”