A few years ago, companies started applying AI to their products and immediately running into pricing problems they couldn’t explain. Per-seat pricing stopped making sense. Costs were real in ways they had never been before. Buyers were confused. Sellers were guessing.
These were familiar pricing problems in an unfamiliar context. Inherent value, relative value, pricing metrics, the Will I / Which One framework I’d been teaching for years. All of it still applied. The challenge was connecting those fundamentals to what was actually happening in AI markets, in a way practitioners could use.
That is where this book started for me.
Michael Mansard came to the project from a different angle. He spent years at Zuora working with SaaS companies at every stage of growth. He had seen hundreds of pricing decisions up close, many that held and many that did not. When AI arrived, he was watching the same companies scramble to reprice and make the same mistakes. He brought that pattern recognition to the book, along with the COMPASS framework, which became one of the book’s most practical tools.
Wolfgang Ulaga brought the academic lens. His research spans value creation and customer value management across industries, and his exposure to companies in very different sectors gave the book range. Where Michael and I were drawing on software and SaaS, Wolfgang kept pulling examples from the wider business world, which sharpened the argument that these pricing principles generalize well beyond AI.
The three of us agreed on one thing from the start: the market was changing faster than any “right answer” could keep up with. Companies needed a navigation system, not a formula.
Pricing AI: Disrupted Markets, Timeless Principles, New Models is that navigation system. It walks through how buyers make decisions, how AI changes costs in ways SaaS never did, how to choose a pricing metric that survives contact with reality, when credits make sense, and when outcome-based pricing is genuinely viable rather than just appealing in theory.
You can order it today on Lulu at this link. It is also working its way through distribution channels and will be available on Amazon soon.
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A note on process: Every idea, argument, and opinion is mine. Claude made the writing better.
Tags: outcome pricing, pricing, Pricing AI, pricing economics, pricing innovation, pricing models, pricing strategy, value, value attribution
