Outcome-based pricing for AI only works if you can check the outcome

AI agents are now sold on outcome-based pricing. In Zendesk's new plans for employee requests, each problem solved beyond a monthly allowance costs $0.99. But the vendor decides what "solved" means. Intercom's Fin counts a customer who stops replying for 24 hours as solved, so a customer who got the right answer and one who gave up cost you the same.

Paying for results instead of seats sounds like the buyer's side of the deal. It is, if the buyer knows what a result is.

A resolution can be silence

Fin's pricing page has a name for the customer who goes quiet: an "assumed resolution". The meter cannot tell that customer from one who got the right answer.

Most companies cannot tell them apart either. According to VentureBeat's survey of 157 organizations with 100 or more employees, run in June 2026, 51% monitor only whether their agent is working: uptime, speed, errors. 23% monitor whether its answers are right. A wrong answer delivered quickly looks healthy on the first kind of dashboard.

If the vendor defines the outcome and you cannot check it, you are paying for the vendor's count.

The outcome is yours to define

Outcome pricing moves risk to the supplier only when the buyer can verify the outcome. That needs three things written down before the contract is signed.

First, what done means for each kind of request, in the words of the team that handles it today. Second, a baseline: how long that work takes now, and how often it comes back. Third, a check the buyer runs, not the vendor: a sample of billed resolutions read every month, and a rule for the person who returns within a week with the same problem.

None of this needs new software. It needs the people who do the work to say what a finished piece of work looks like.

Three questions before you sign

1. Of the resolutions we were billed for last month, how many did a customer or employee confirm, and how many were assumed?
2. When the same person comes back within seven days, is the charge reversed?
3. Who on our side owns the definition of done, and do they do that work themselves?

At Wyrework, return on intelligence starts with this step. We agree the outcome and the baseline with the team that does the work, so that any price per outcome is a price for something the business can see and check.