Software To Replace the Services Economy

We built FOMO.ai around outcome based pricing, and the rest of the industry is likely to follow.

As I was thinking about what to do with AI, I kept coming back to the same question: why are we still pricing software like it’s 2010?

For the last twenty years, the entire SaaS industry has run on a per seat pricing model. You pay per user, per month. The value you get from the software depends almost entirely on how well your people use it. The software helps you do the work, but a human still has to sit there and actually do it.

The thesis behind FOMO.ai was always different. We didn’t want to sell access to a tool and then hope our customers figured out how to get value from it. We wanted to deliver completed work. Actual marketing output. Content that’s written, strategies that are executed, campaigns that are live. The outcome, not just the environment to work in.

And I’m now seeing this same shift happening across the entire software industry.

Software is starting to look a lot like a services business.

Think about what a services firm does. You hire McKinsey or Deloitte or a specialized agency, and they complete a project for you. They deliver an outcome. You don’t pay them per seat. You pay them because they promised to get something done, and then they did.

(Ironically, these same firms are already delivering work done by AI, and getting caught with their pants down because they used the tools badly and did not give humans a chance to check it.)

Now imagine software that works the same way. You don’t pay for access to a dashboard. You pay because the software completed a biotech drug discovery process, or designed an engineering project, or built an entire content strategy from scratch. That’s where things are heading, and quickly.

If you look at the total revenue generated by the global services economy and imagine even a fraction of that shifting to software companies who can deliver the same outcomes at 10x to 100x the efficiency, you start to understand why people in the venture capital world are losing their minds right now. The companies that figure out how to deliver on that value creation are going to generate outsized returns.

I see this every day in our own work.

We use AI at FOMO.ai to complete projects that I would have previously needed to hire an outside firm for. Research projects that would have taken a team of analysts months, we can now get meaningful output from in a matter of days. And in some cases, the AI produces insights that no services firm could have delivered because of the sheer volume of data it can process and the patterns it can identify.

That’s a wild thing to say out loud, but I believe it’s true. And it’s exactly why we built the company the way we did.

The job consolidation piece is even more interesting.

Something else is happening alongside this shift, and you can see it playing out in real time at companies of every size. Job functions are consolidating. A product manager, a UX designer, and a developer used to be three distinct roles with clear boundaries. Now you’ve got designers saying, “I can vibe code this myself,” developers saying, “I can handle the UX with a plugin,” and product managers saying, “I can do both of those functions.” Three jobs are competing to do the same work.

And then there’s the middle manager question. Think about what a typical middle manager at a large company actually does day to day. They go to meetings, they decide what meetings to schedule, they set the agenda, they create action items, and they follow up. A huge portion of that workflow is now being handled by AI meeting tools that listen, transcribe, generate action items, and track follow-through. All that coordination work that used to require a person is quietly being automated.

When one person can credibly do the work of three or four, the math changes dramatically. Companies become more profitable with smaller teams. Individual employees become far more valuable because their output multiplies. And the companies that figure out how to structure themselves around this new reality are going to generate returns that seem almost unfair compared to competitors who are still staffed the old way.

What this means for you.

If you run a business or a marketing team, this isn’t a theoretical conversation. The shift from per-seat software pricing to outcome-based pricing is going to change what you buy, how you buy it, and what you expect from the tools you invest in.

Without trying to sound overly dramatic, I think the question for every business owner right now is whether you’re going to restructure around this new reality or watch your competitors do it first.