Unpacking Workday’s agentic AI pricing model

Only 35% of CIOs have full visibility into their AI operating costs, according to a new KPMG survey. That makes it difficult for them to control spend on software-as-a-service offerings from vendors who, like Workday, have incorporated pay-as-you-go agentic AI into their offerings. Workday is one of several vendors that have shifted to a hybrid subscription/consumption pricing model.

“Fundamentally, with AI we are shifting the value of what enterprise software as a service is delivering in the industry,” Workday CTO Gabe Monroy explained in a recent interview. “The key, though, is that the value is no longer derived by a fixed factor, like how many employees you have working for you. It’s now going to be derived by how much use are you getting out of the system, hence the consumption.”

However, “It’s going to be in some cases disruptive to our customers, and it’s incumbent on us to provide them with tools to forecast and navigate that transition effectively,” he said.

That will be welcome news for the 40% of organizations that KPMG found have usage or token budgets in place.

The changes Monroy described are part of an industry trend, according to Terra Higginson, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group. “What we are seeing in the market is that basic seat pricing and seat counts are not going away. Customers are still paying for the core subscription footprint. AI is being layered on top as an incremental cost,” she said. “The practical message is simple: expect to pay more. The pricing model may shift from seats to credits or consumption, but the direction of spend is still up.”

And because each vendor’s program has its own twists and its own ways of measuring and charging for usage, every new model adds a layer of complexity to the budgeting headaches CIOs already face thanks to the ongoing move to consumption-based services, which began with the cloud.

Two parts to the model

Workday’s AI pricing model is in two parts. First, customers subscribe to the services they want, as they always have. With that subscription, they receive a pool of Flex Credits that can be used to enable AI agents and other “applicable platform capabilities” including Agent-Ready Tools, Workday Data Cloud, and high-volume use of Sana through its conversational AI interface. The number of credits included varies by company size. But on top of that, they also purchase a subscription for additional Flex Credits that can be applied to any product they subscribe to.

Flex Credit usage is monitored through the Platform Consumption Console, which generates alerts when consumption hits 80%, 90% and 100% of subscribed credits. Use is metered when a task is completed.

However, one Flex Credit doesn’t necessarily equal one action. Workday’s rate card lists the number of credits per activity; for example, as of May 21, in the Recruiting Agent, it currently costs six credits to screen and grade each candidate’s resumé against a job opening, and 750 credits per requisition to identify relevant leads in existing talent pools and rediscover candidates for recruiters, recommending jobs for those candidates to apply for. In the Contract Negotiation Agent, the review and redlining of a contract, based on a playbook, costs 500 credits.

The company also provides a reference guide listing the credits used by actions performed by the Sana platform and by self-service agents.

The good news is that, though Workday’s console counts credits used in both production and pre-production environments, only those used in production are charged for, offering an early budgeting reality check and a chance to tweak processes before they land in production. Pre-production usage count is only in aggregate, however, so if a customer wants to size a specific agent, the best approach is to run it in a defined window or dedicated test tenant and compare usage before and after the test.

Use them or lose them

The bad news is that Flex Credits expire after one year, and any left in a subscription do not roll over to the next; it’s a use them or lose them situation.

If, on the other hand, a customer exceeds their Flex Credit balance during the year, Workday said it does not just turn off their agents or other access to services. Instead, Workday’s account teams “partner with them to reconcile usage and help them purchase additional credits.”

Analysts agree that there are pros and cons to this new market reality.

“Workday’s Flex Credits are part of a broader shift we’re seeing across SaaS,” said Melody Brue, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “Vendors are defining their own proprietary units for AI consumption so they can meter usage on top of existing subscriptions.”

Workday’s model, she said, is more flexible than a static AI add-on because customers can use Flex Credits for whichever agents drive the most value at a given time and get access to new AI capabilities as they launch.

The trade-off, however, is predictability. “Credit burn rates vary widely by task,” she said. A pilot can quietly consume a year’s worth of Flex Credits within weeks without strong telemetry and governance. And that, she said is what worries technology and finance leaders: apparently successful AI adoption that shows up as a budget surprise.

But, said Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, “The Workday Flex Credits Rate Card seeks to quantify consumption of Flex Credits to specific value-added actions that are AI agent-driven. Many other vendors in the ERP space have created incredibly complex, multi-layered consumption models, leaving their customers’ heads spinning as they seek to decipher how capacity will be consumed, much less if it can add value.”

Brue, too, approved of Workday’s model, although she said that a core issue with AI pricing today is that vendors are each defining their own units, with no common measurement across platforms. This gives vendors pricing flexibility, but makes customers do extra work to create meaningful metrics like cost per resolution or cost per process run, just to keep budgets and ROI under control.

“Workday’s Flex Credits are a smart move for Workday because they align revenue with AI usage, but from the buyer’s side, they raise the bar on FinOps and governance,” she said. “You need clear dashboards, guardrails, and forecasting, or that flexibility can quickly turn into a budget black hole.”