Scott Wu: AI output-based value breaks traditional seat-based SaaS monetization
Scott Wu · Tech Executives: AI Has Changed SaaS Forever (Don't Fall Behind) · Jul 18, 2025 · at 8:08
Scott Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Metronome, a usage-based billing platform. He explains how software value metrics are evolving from cloud seat access to AI task execution.
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“AI is changing the value prop of software. You know, it's kind of doing two things at once. One, it's like the software is not doing work on your behalf. And so the core value of the software is not who in my org has access to the data. It's like, what can this software do for me? Like, you know, can it write code for me? Can it like defer tickets or something like in the customer support use case? So like AI is doing work. And then the second thing that's happening is if you follow that line of thinking, also the number of people who have access to that system is shrinking because you're like able to get efficiency gains. And so the, so what's happening is for these SaaS businesses, they're like their core metric before was number of people that's like Kind of trending down. Maybe it's staying flat. And then at the same time, the value is now the work that the software is doing on my behalf, which doesn't monetize in the like scaling with users way. And so fundamentally that's what's happening in this moment. And so because the value is changing, it's opening the door for a new commercial model.”
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