Seat-based pricing isn't dead, but it's on life support, though it has nothing to do with AI now or realistically in the future.

Consumption based pricing is becoming/already the norm for 2 reasons. As a SaaS operator, my storage/compute/etc costs tend to go up with your usage. If I can bill by the metrics that affect my cost, then:

1. It feels more fair to the buyer (pay for what you use) and

2. Investors and finance folks like it because I can build a pricing model with consistent gross margins

This whole thing is hinged on the multitenant SaaS model generally though, and it being so prominent. For example, if I ship self-managed software, I no longer genefally incur hardware usage costs (except my support costs probably go up roughly linearly to usage).

AI doesn't affect any of this reasoning.