benjsm

Gotcha - the company can’t always determine this without needing access to their customers systems in order to. We automate that for them.

Agreed and that’s what we are working to eliminate. It’s on us to approve what a successful outcome is, based on the terms of their agreement.

Ah got it. Gaming the system in what sense?

Yes - not sure I follow. Happy to hear more about why that came to mind...

Thank you - would love to hear more about the gaming use case.

Not quite, because the buyer and seller would never agree to that being a real outcome. It would have to meet certain requirements/thresholds for customer satisfaction. That’s where we come in to verify that those contract terms are actually met as it happens.

There are a ton of ways to calculate cost savings depending on what it’s built for. Voice agents that handle booking and outbound calls, supplier sourcing agents that only buy the best priced items, etc. It’s then possible to translate those things into a monetary figure, relative to the business.

Unfamiliar with it. Is there a link I can check out?

Thank you. I agree, that transparency piece is crucial and something we’re really focused on.

Thanks for that - on it. Would love to run you through it myself. How can I reach you?

I get it. It definitely isn’t the right fit for every use case at this point in time. That’s why we’ve built support for subscription and usage models as well. Then there's incentive for a sales tool to still charge on usage or subscriptions (slightly less than they normally would), but have the upside of an outcome converting. For buyers, this should be seen as the seller having confidence in their product.

Agents are pretty good at finding people on the internet now. It worked. We never got into grant-writing though, but it seems to be a different service. How do you do it?

Definitely digging deeper into this now. I think it becomes more and more important as models improve.

Very very interesting. It makes a lot of sense. I appreciate you sharing.

100%! We think pricing and biz model will become a differentiator. Being able to adapt and iterate on pricing will be really important as underlying models get better

Agreed - we think it’s similar to when Google Ads first released over two decades ago :)

Thank you - yes! Would love to lean more about mechanism design. Mind diving deeper?

Thanks! Definitely see where you’re coming from. Software startups with really good products are generating massive amounts of business value for their customers right now. Subscriptions and usage models really constrain them in how much they can capture of that. Incentives are also constantly misaligned, especially with usage as buyers will always try to minimize usage as much as possible. Charging on outcomes changes that.

The entire AI customer support industry has pretty much already converged into this model. Tickets closed without being escalated to humans are usually what’s defined as an outcome. We think this model makes the most sense for any vertical AI company where agents are actually completing tasks end to end.

Success is defined by the buyer and seller before they use us. We just facilitate the parameters they agreed upon, so it’s pretty variable. A successful outcome can be anything from sourcing a real estate property that ends up closing to finding $X in cost savings for a dental clinic, using research agents. The biggest difference is you’re not just charging for tokens, but assigning a dollar figure to what a job well done looks like, no matter how many tokens it takes to get there.

It’s a really tough time for non-profits. Large amounts of their funding was cut, which is genuinely impacting their day-to-day. Employees work long hours and are not paid well. Turnover rate is really high. It’s just a really hard industry right now.

Thank you! To define the outcomes, it will be up to our customer and their users to state precisely what an outcome is and how it will appear. Once we have that information, we sync into their systems of record and act as that verification layer. It’s not an automated self-report-system, because they don’t have to report anything. As the work gets completed successfully (ie, a meeting booked or a customer support ticket closed) we will see it, verify it and bill it in realtime.

Would love to chat as well (ben@useskope.com) if you have any questions specific to your use case. May be able to give a better answer, as the nuance really varies by use case.

I really like this. It feels like the only inevitability is change. Change, to some extent, not yet known.