Why outcome-billing makes sense for AI Agents | Hacker News Reader

Why outcome-billing makes sense for AI Agents

valmi.io

33 pointsrajvarkala68 comments

I started reading the article and immediately got hit by the incorrect statement in the opening:

> 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.

I think this is an oversimplification designed to make LLMs seem more profitable than they actually are.

oversimplified surely, sweeping assumptions....

As much as I hate the assumptions, the worst case scenario is that AI is surely affecting some jobs.

But I'm sure that 30% employee is more valuable than just calling API in one month. So the price is too high.

Productivity continues to increase but we are employing more people, not less

Of course, there is displacement. Jobs evolve.

This is an article written by a company/llm trying to justify huge increases to the pricing structure.

Oh! Yknow that thing we were charging you $200 a month for now? We're going to start charging you for the value we provide, and it will now be $5,000 a month.

Meanwhile, the metrics for "value" are completely gamed.

> Meanwhile, the metrics for "value" are completely gamed.

Well, of course. One of the huge advantages of agents is that they will actually help you to almost any extent game metrics.

Unlike people, who have ...

The price will be what you are willing to pay. No justification required, excepting for fairness (info asymmetry and what else?). It is written by me. Unfunded bootstrapped !!call it dire straits.

At the same time, I actually wouldn’t mind a world in which AI agents cost $5000 a month if that’s what companies want to charge.

I feel like at some level that would remove the possibility of making a “just as good as humans but basically free” arguments and move discussion in the direction that feels more productive: discussing real benefits and shortcomings of both. Eg, loss of context with agents vs HR costs with humans, etc…

If the AI does all the easy tickets, there's no easing in new hires, so that process is going to be more expensive, so I better get discounted for that hit.

If there is zero slack, and only the hardest parts, this is no longer the job it was before. Salaries will have to go up, or retention will go down. In addition these jobs could already be awful when there was some slack, removing all slack tasks to AI is going to make them miserable so average customer interaction once they get to a human agent is probably going to be worse so your customer satisfaction will take a hit. So I better get discounted with that reputational hit.

It's like the 'have AI pick the tomatoes it can, and the field worker the rest'. Picking the easy tomatoes is factored into the job. Having the ai pick the easy ones could break the whole model. Of having zero slack for the workers could break them and result in no one showing up to jobs where AI has done the easy picking.

One reason slack exists is because of capacity and utilization, less slack -> higher wait times in peak times.

Is slack intended for Employee welfare? Come on, we are talking corporate here.

The support services are already regimented - L1, L2 etc. I am not a fan of AI either, but it may be a new reality.

You sound incredibly short sighted. Yeah slack and making sure people don't just get unwinnable tickets all day is important for retention. And if your company needs more than warm bodies reading a script, yeah, you account for it.

Most machinery you can't run 100% capacity. Most machinery you can't run 24/7. You schedule load. You schedule downtime. And the higher the capacity, the more the machine costs. If you aren't aware of this for your people you are failing at your job.

Not sure I follow. But, the first paragraph is interesting.

You are saying, employees stick around if they are given easy tickets, and companies care about passing along easy tickets so warm bodies do not churn.

That will be a big claim.

You can apply the same philosophy to employees and if you dare to do so you will quickly find out that it does not work. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure - Goodhart's law. I cannot see why AI agents should be treated differently when it comes to fuzzy measurements of performance.

Bcuz the performance is usually not fuzzy and also the law only applies to certain jobs -- you would not apply the law to salesmen or customer support agents.

Salesmen making bad deals that boost their numbers and then don't make money in the long-term is one of the first things you learn when you work in an org that sells in the enterprise market.

Ur in a software bubble, there are millions of sales jobs where you sell a simple product and the only thing that matters is sale volume and maybe "dont be a dick". The really strategic sales process we employ in tech is the exception.

ok... how do you measure the performance of a coding assistant? Counting the lines of code written, bugs closed, PRs reviewed, some fuzzy measurement of quality or something else?

I think this article is moreso referring to support and other rote processing-like agents.

Salesmen are absolutely perfect example. They quite often have even greater incentives as they can directly financially benefit. So selling products that are not needed, that are over priced or entirely misrepresented is extremely common.

Outcome billing is ideal for pretty much any SaaS product.

Sounds great in theory, until you realize everyone has a different definition of outcome.

Understood.

Take for instance, customer support Agent , that is supposed to resolve tickets. Assuming it resolves around 30% tickets by an objective measure. Do you think that cannot be captured and agreed upon by both sides?

You get what you measure. The bot might be really bad and customers close the chat and it gets counted as success etc.

The same applies to human agents as well. Humans are incentivised differently ? How?

The same oversight mechanism that applies to humans cannot correct the flaws of AI agents?

Except the meta reason for employing AI for these use cases is to stop employing the humans?

Already, today, human customer support agents' performance is measured in ticket resolution, and the Goodhart's Law consequences of that are trivial visible to anyone that's ever tried to get a ticket actually resolved, as opposed to simply marked "resolved" in a ticketing system somewhere…

We just give today's human performance metrics to AI agents.

AI agent developers internally have a metric they are targeting to improve. That itself violates goodhart law.

At scale? Programmatically? In a way that actually saves time and doesn't create billing conflict (that always happens to benefit the LLM vendor)?

No I do not.

Interesting. Let's take the case of infra spend on AWS. Amazon says you invoked serverless calls 100k times and you are charged for it. How are you trusting them?

The comparison doesn't quite hold because AWS is a utility; they aren't an arbiter of quality. Amazon charges for a serverless call regardless of whether your code worked or crashed. You pay for the effort (compute), which is verifiable and binary.

Once you shift to billing for outcomes like "resolutions," the vendor switches from a utility provider to the judge and jury of their own performance. At scale, that creates a "fox guarding the henhouse" dynamic. The friction of auditing those outcomes to ensure they aren't just Goodharted metrics eventually offsets the simplicity the model promises. Frankly, I just cannot and will not trust the judgment of tech companies who evangelize their own LLM outputs.

How do you verify AWS charges? By inspecting logs? There goes the arbiter.

I get the binary part. The biggest difference is the subjective component of outcome? However, a tech provider - especially Agent provider - has to bring down the subjective to a quantitative metric when selling. If that cannot be done, I am not sure what we are going to be buying from Agent builders/providers?

If your customer base is so broud that you can't define a clear outcome for your nitche, your company probably isnt focused enough. Especially for a start up.

So who's the arbiter to determine if the outcome was achieved?

And how do you programmatically measure it?

The obvious solution is just to throw more LLM's at it to verify the output of the other LLM and that it is doing its job...

\s (mostly because you know this will be the "Solution" that many will just run with despite the very real issue of how "persuadable" these systems are)...

The real answer is that even that will fail and there will have to be a feedback loop with a human that will likely in many cases lead to more churn trying to fix the work the AI did vs if the human just did it in the first place.

Instead of focusing on the places that using an AI tool can truly cut down on time spent like searching for something (which can still fail but at least the risk when a failure is far lower vs producing output).

This is the problem with this, in simple cases like “you add N employees” then you can vaguely approximate it, like they do in the article.

But for anything that’s not this trivial example, the person who knows the value most accurately is … the customer! Who is also the person who is paying the bill, so there’s strong financial incentive for them not to reveal this info to you.

I don’t think this will work …

I often go back to customer support voice AI agent example. Let's say, The bot can resolve tickets successfully at a certain rate . This is capturable easily. Why is this difficult? What cases am I missing?

Hi alberth,

I'd assume an outcome is a negotiated agreement between buyer and Agent provider.

Think of all the n8n workflows. If we take a simple example of Expense receipt processing workflows, or a lead sourcing workflow, I'd think the outcomes can be counted pretty well. In these cases, successfully entered receipts into ERP or number of Entries captured in salesforce.

I am sure there are cases where outcomes are fuzzy, for instances employer-employee agreement.

But in some cases, for instance, my accounting agent would only get paid if he successfully uploads my tax returns.

Surely not applicable in all cases. But, in cases Where a human is measured on outcomes, the same should be applicable for agents too, I guess

> But in some cases, for instance, my accounting agent would only get paid if he successfully uploads my tax returns.

I think you'd want it to correctly compute your taxes. Especially if you get a letter a year or two after the fact saying you owe the government money

Indeed. The whole AI game is predicated on the fact that they can deliver work equivalent to humans in some cases. If that is never going to be the case, then this whole agentic stuff goes belly-up.

The alternative scenario is they get better and do some work really well. That is an interesting territory to focus on.

That's litterlly the job of a founder. You talk to cusomters and learn from them.

Outcome-billing makes absolute sense! In every case where I have used an LLM to work on a software project, I have been frustrated by the process and end up educating the thing myself. The outcome is that it has learned from me, so I need a place to send my consulting bill.

The one wrinkle this might have is that it incentivizes the agent developer to over-resolve or “over outcome” to ensure they hit targets.

This is risking the end customer experience for your Agent buyer, which might not be worth the risk to a company that wants to keep customers very happy.

Yes. Always exists. There neesd to be a secondary mechanism to verify .

But, again, such systems already exist. The folk theorem guarantees this. In a repeated game, people crave reputation.

For instance, seller over-resolving will suffer in the long run, I guess.

Maybe it's not as nice a story there as he's from India, but outside India people like to talk about their cobra problem and failed solution (retold below). This feels like that. If it's a ticket system, it could close them all as unresovable overnight. If it cares about customer satisfaction, it could give everybody thousand dollar gift cards. Point is, AIs existence is predicated on finding a way to improve its score by any means necessary, and that needs very careful bounding.

I believe it was under British rule, they offered a reward for people bringing in dead cobras as proof of culling. Which worked until people started breeding them just to get the reward. Humans gamed the system and it made the problem worse.

Sure, incentives can be gamed.

The same oversight mechanism that applies to humans cannot correct the flaws of AI agents? What do you think is the catch?

I am not saying things are clearly defined in most settings. But my accounting agent ( real person) gets paid only when he files my tax returns.

Right, it doesn't work the same for humans as it does AI agents.

If you finetune a model and it starts misbehaving, what are you going to do to it exactly? PIP it? Fire it? Of course not. AIs cannot be managed the same ways as humans (and I would argue that's for the best). Best you can do is try using a different model, but you have no guarantee that whatever issue your model has is actually solved in the new one.

Humans respect the rules because if they don't, then they lose their jobs, can't pay their mortgages, and become homeless. That's quite a powerful incentive not to fudge the numbers too much.

There's no LLM equivalent.

The agent builder loses contract .. Is this not force enough to make AI worthwhile?

Why would the AI care? The agent builder is still asking a non-deterministic black box with no skin in the game to behave a certain way, they have no guarantees.

If the AI is never going to be manageable, never trustable, then the whole idea of agentic systems is dumb.

What is the point of an agent running and you don't trust it?

That would be equivalent to calling this whole AI wave useless. May be it is, maybe it is not.

That's ... how they fundamentally work?

I think it gets more nebulous. For example, does he only get paid if the tax returns are accepted by the government? If they aren't, he's still put in the work. This becomes an extremely slippery slope. A better example is probably retail. In the US at least, places like Walmart and Amazon allow for returns, but they usually just throw it out. That's gotta be built into the price. Meaning, the cheapy no returns accepted online stores are cheaper because the cost for the purchaser isn't tied to satisfaction.

Your accountant has to build in margin that you pay for for clients who stiff him on the bill or who he has to take to court to argue he did the service as described in the contract. If you didn't hold that threshold over his head, he would be able to charge less. Would he? Maybe not, I don't know the guy, but he could.

Understood. So, a better way is to keep him on a retainer? Or let Amazon or Cheaper store do a cost-plus model?

I think that is the core of the argument. It is the risk-sharing between buyer and seller. If sold on outcomes, seller carries all risk. If sold on work-put-in, buyer carries all risk.

Add to that, in some scenarios, outcomes themselves are fuzzy.

Cost plus I'm not sure on. Maybe if your work was in small enough chunks. But if, did example, just generating one response is too expensive, there's no plus, it's just somebody paid $ for some bits in GPU memory and that's likely not useful to anyone.

Yes exactly. Your second paragraph hits the nail on the head. And I'm sure you agree that the AI companies aren't going to take on more risk for free.

It really makes sense, and the best part — customers love it. It’s the simple form of pricing, and it’s simple to understand.

In many cases though, you don’t know whether the outcome is correct or not but we just have evals for that.

Our product is a SOTA recall-first web search for complex queries. For example, let’s say your agent needs to find all instances of product launches in the past week.

“Classic” web search would return top results while ours return a full dataset where each row is a unique product (with citations to web pages)

We charge a flat fee per record. So, if we found 100 records, you pay us for 100. Of its 0 then it’s free.

I get sad when I read comments like these, because I feel like HN is the only forum left where real discussion between real people providing real thoughts are happening. I think that is changing unfortunately. The em-dashes and the strange ticks immediate triggers my anti-bodies and devalues it, whether that is appropriate or not.

Do you mean it’s written by AI?

Or just my writing style?

Not the writing style, but the fact that the em-dashes and strange ticks make it indistinguishable from something AI-generated. At least take the time to replace them with something you can produce easily on a physical keyboard.

Edit:

Well, actually - this kind of writing style does feel quite AI-ish:

> It really makes sense, and the best part — customers love it

It might be a Windows vs. MacOS/Linux thing, but regardless - it's becoming a similar kind of pattern that I'm subconsciously learning to ignore/filter out, similar to banner blindness and ads/editorials.

Chrome on iPhone

Why does it produce different ticks and em-dashes?

The em dashes didn't strike me as LLM because they had spaces on either side, something I don't typically see in LLM outputs as much. But the quote you highlighted is pretty much dead-on for LLM "speak" I must admit. In the end though, I think this is human written.

Outcome billing may seem to make sense for AI.

Maybe the pricing model makes sense in the beginning.

Until people will realize the big secret - AI is still just software.

A new category of software.

The price of software generally only goes in one direction, and that’s a race to the bottom.

This is actually what I thought. Although, AI agent developers can capture 1:10 of value delivered - assuming AI agents deliver - but with competiton among Agent builders, the value capture will go down. That is one possibility

Is this actually different from just guaranteeing some metrics? Like if you have a document processing “agent” that extracts fields from forms, you’d have an accuracy threshold and have some checks set up to verify this?

Does “outcome billing” amount to anything different?

I think what you described would be a good definition of outcome. But, Who bills customers that way if you think about software providers? The prevailing models are fixed fee , hourly fee or infra-spend fee.

There is an argument to be made that SaaS tools tap the tool budget whereas AI agents can tap the worker budget of companies.

I am looking to understand more nuances here.

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