During a keynote panel at Enterprise Connect 2026, I asked representatives from RingCentral, Vonage, and Dialpad to do a little speculating about how the rise of AI might impact the nature of collaboration within enterprises, especially if predictions about AI decimating job positions for human employees turn out to be correct.
We took the discussion down a path of imagining what the very idea of “collaboration” might mean in such a world: Humans “talking” to machines or even to applications or documents, as well as to each other? What must a collaboration software platform look like in such a world, to support the new ways of working?
But, my bad, I failed to ask the panelists a more basic question: What will it mean for your business if enterprises wind up slashing their workforces, particularly knowledge workers? Fewer humans presumably means fewer seat licenses, which means less revenue for the vendors.
It turns out that folks at Microsoft, among others perhaps, have been thinking about this conundrum, and they’ve come up with a possible answer: All those AI agents you’ll be deploying? Each one of them might be a “user,” requiring a seat license.
Business Insider cites a talk by Rajesh Jha of Microsoft, quoting him as saying, “All of those embodied agents are seat opportunities.” According to the writer, Jha “envision[s] organizations with more agents than humans — each effectively a user that must pay for a software license, or ‘seat.’”
I don’t know about you, but my first reaction to such an idea was, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Given AI’s challenges with accuracy, usability, and governance, it’s far from certain that we’ll witness a massive replacement of human workers in anything like the near or medium term, and if we ever do, the world will have bigger problems to worry about than software pricing. But it is an interesting and potentially important question: What’s a “user,” anyway? That was really the question I discussed with the 3 collaboration vendors at EC2026.
I suppose the Microsoft argument would be that per-seat licensing is a proxy for measuring the scale at which the enterprise uses the software in question – that volume of “use” rather than of “users” is what should determine how much the enterprise pays. This would be even more relevant in the SaaS era, when more usage of an application likely means more strain on the SaaS provider’s resources.
Except that’s never how enterprises have understood the deal before, and they’ve run their businesses according to the long-established model. License management has been binary: Someone gets the application or they don’t. If you give them one of the enterprise’s licenses and then they don’t use it, or use it only rarely, you’re wasting money. We’ve seen this dynamic with Microsoft Copilot and other AI assistants that carry a separate license fee; many IT managers have been stringent about taking away licenses from those who wind up not using the feature much or at all.
Could SaaS providers shift their model from per-seat (i.e., per-user) pricing to something based on metered use of computing resources for each application? Would they have any incentive to do this, and would enterprise leaders have either the desire or the leverage to force this kind of shift? We saw Amazon Web Service enter the market with Amazon Connect using a per-minute pricing model, versus the industry standard per-seat model, so there’s some precedent, if not an exact replica.
The Business Insider writer suggests something similar: That if incumbent SaaS providers were to go through with charging AI agents a seat license, this could create an opening for new market entrants who wouldn’t do that. Jeff Bezos famously said, “Your margin is my opportunity.” Could we be looking at a world where AI disrupts not just technology, but pricing?
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