Zendesk CEO Tom Eggemeier has championed the company’s innovative agentic AI pricing model.
The CRM stalwart blends outcome-based and flexible approaches to become the "first and only company offering flexible pricing" for AI agents.
Speaking at Zendesk Relate 2025, the CEO used his keynote speech to discuss the vendor's pricing policy - alongside several of its major releases and product enhancements.
The pricing model ensures that customers are only charged when Zendesk's AI agents successfully resolve issues autonomously.
While other vendors have considered such pricing models. Yet, defining what "good" outcomes look like - on a customer-by-customer basis - has proven a stumbling block.
Zendesk, however, believes it has found the answer by only charging customers when AI autonomously resolves the issue.
It's also offering a starter usage level of no additional cost, so companies can first nail their AI agent strategy and then scale it.
As companies scale, they can pinpoint the intents they'd like AI agents to handle and those they'd like humans to handle - dialing this up and down as they refine their strategies.
The pricing model scales up and down with the contact center intuitively, enabling that flex.
In presenting this pricing approach, Eggemeier took aim at some of Zendesk’s competitors.
He argued that while they might declare outcome-based pricing as the future of the sector: "The farthest any of them have gone is offering consumption-based or interaction-based pricing.
Absolutely no one at our scale offers true outcome-based pricing – because no one else is as committed to aligning with your success as we are at Zendesk.
Eggemeier expounded on these remarks, providing a personal example where he recently used an airline’s AI agent to rebook his connection but lost service before completion.
Assuming the booking was finalized, he later called a human agent – only to find they had no record of the interaction with the AI agent.
Forced to start over, the CEO explained how this led to him facing an eight-hour delay while others secured new flights ahead of him.
While Eggemeier’s experience may seem fairly innocuous, he explained how it perfectly encapsulates the need for more sophisticated pricing models.