AI Radar is Jasmin Guthmann’s monthly column on Agentic AI, business transformation, and the future of digital value creation. With many years of experience in technology, transformation, and AI, she is one of the established voices shaping the conversation around the future of digital business. In April 2025, her book If There Is a Will, There Is a Way was published — a no-compromise guide to unlocking potential by focusing on what truly matters. Her message: take action, embrace responsibility, and stand for what you believe in.
In the diva-e Conclusion column AI Radar, she shares insights from her practical experience, provides context on current developments, challenges trends, and explores what technological change means for businesses, leadership, and organizations.
A new pricing model. No price yet.
A client. Mid-size retail, solid platform, long-standing vendor relationship. They want to go agentic. Sensible. The vendor says: happy to help, but you'll need to upgrade your edition first. Fine.
What does the upgrade cost?Nobody knows. Not the account manager. Not the partner. Not the pricing sheet.
Second question: And once we're upgraded, what does the agentic part cost? Answer: that's billed on usage. On top.
So the client is now looking at a fixed number nobody can quote, plus a variable number nobody can forecast, stacked on a seat licence they already pay. Three layers. One of them known. This is what "commercial model in transition" looks like from the buyer's chair.
Benioff said the quiet part out loud
Mid-September, 43,000 people in San Francisco. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff opened Dreamforce with AIforce, an agentic interface layer built to replace the browser-and-click experience most enterprises still run on. The pitch, in Salesforce's own framing: stop making people use software, let agents use it for them. Salesforce data, permissions, actions and workflows now surface inside Claude, Copilot, Gemini and Slack. The CRM your sales team lived in for fifteen years becomes a backend they may never open again.
Read that again. The company that trained a generation of sales reps to live in a screen just told 43,000 customers the screen is optional. Salesforce isn't wrong. It's early. And it has done the maths the rest of the market hasn't.
Follow the money
Watch what shifted underneath the keynote. Salesforce is moving monetisation toward Agentforce actions, outcomes, Data 360 consumption and bundled Flex Credits, defending contract value as seats come under pressure. Translation: the vendor knows the per-seatmodel is on its way out and has already built the next one. Have you?
Ask your CFO how enterprise software is bought in your company. Seats.
Ask how usage is measured. Logins.
Ask what an agent is. Something that doesn't log in.
Three lines in your budget just lost their unit of measurement. The licence line, priced per human. The training line, that teaches humans which button to press. The UX line, that redesigns the button. When the agent is the user, none of these are wrong. They areirrelevant.
"Our people won't stop using the UI overnight"
Correct. Nobody is saying they will.
In August I wrote about pilot purgatory: the architecture can't carry the agent. In September, the missing line item: nobody costed what the agent burns.
October is the third layer down. Even where the architecture holds and the tokens are budgeted, the commercialmodel you sit on was built for a user who is about to become a minority.
The seat count in your next renewal is a bet that humans remain the primary interface for the next three years. Most companies are placing that bet without knowing they are placing it.
Headless used to be a commerce word
Front end separate from back end. We built that for shops. Now it's an enterprise word, and the front end is an agent you didn't build. Three consequences.
Your integration layer becomes the product. If Salesforce, SAP and your PIM are all back-ends behind one agent, the thing that decides which system speaks, in what order, with which permissions, is the most valuable software you own. In most companies it doesn'texist yet. That gap is the reason we built the Agentic Experience Foundation. Not a super agent. The layer that lets your existing systems be used by agents you didn't build, without rebuilding the systems.
Your vendor contracts already have a second unit.
You just haven't priced it. The client from the opening didn't refuse usage-based billing. They were never shown a number to refuse. Actions, calls, consumption, outcomes: if that line in your renewal says "TBD", youare letting the vendor fill it in for you in 2028, when your negotiating position is gone.
Your UX budget doesn't go to zero.
It moves. From designing screens to designing what the agent may do and how a human sees that it did it. Fewer pixels. More permissions. Most UX teams have not been told.
Nobody is clicking
The vendor with the most to lose from the end of the interface just announced that end on its own stage. The uncomfortable part isn't that Salesforce moved. It's that your renewal spreadsheet didn't. The interface is dying. The invoice hasn't noticed.
On 6 October we take this – and more - apart in a live webinar: Salesforce after Dreamforce 2026: Agentic Enterprise in Manufacturing.
Want to know what your own agent layer should look like before the next renewal? Start with the Agentic Experience Foundation (AXF).
