Hey AI Agent Developer - yes, you. What is the value you create? Let's find out.
The Skeptic's Take: Useful vs. Intelligent
On the spectrum of "Is AI intelligent and able to reason?", I fall on the skeptical side. But is it useful? Absolutely. We have built a few AI workflows, and they have unlocked superior automation. Evidently, the world is currently witnessing the transformative potential of AI agents in customer support and coding, to some degree.
Take customer support, for instance. If AI agents help each support employee handle 30% more tickets, that's like adding 30 new hires to a 100-person team, without the cost. For a $100M company, this efficiency gain could translate to $20-30M in additional enterprise value (EV), under sweeping assumptions. The difference in EV between pre- and post-AI agents is the Value you create. Alternatively, one could also use operating income for a flow perspective.
Two Critical Questions
'Digital worker' is, in fact, a fitting neologism for the AI agent. I take the view here that human workers, together with digital workers, can do more, creating abundance. As AI agent developers, we should be asking:
What is our share in the value we create, and how should we price AI agents?
Why do legacy billing systems prove inadequate?
Outcomes Matter. Internals Don't.
There are two parts to our first question: First, what an AI agent or a workflow does internally, for instance, the number of reasoning steps involved, is irrelevant. However, measuring outcomes such as the number of support tickets resolved or the number of successful hires is directly proportional to the value we want to measure. Second, what share do we take? Simply going by the 10x rule of SaaS pricing guidelines, we can claim one-tenth of what we measured. Thus, measuring outcomes becomes imperative. We have built Valmi to ingest outcomes as the first step. The added complexity that Valmi addresses is where legacy billing systems sputter.
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