How will AI in the buying process impact pricing?
Steven Forth is a principle at Ibbaka and valueIQ. Connect on LinkedIn
“AI in the buying process will force companies to put value models and pricing models on their websites in formats friendly to generative AI.”
AI and AI agents as a sales tool are attracting a lot of attention. There are many AI SDRs available (Sales Development Representatives), there are agents to find leads, quality leads, help with communication and negotiation. AI in the sales process is a big deal.
But when we talk about the sales process we should begin with the buying process. A good sales process aligns with and enables the customer buying process, not the other way around.
So how is AI enabling the buying process?
One interesting development in this area is Vendr’s new AI Ruth. Ruth is a generative AI agent that reveals pricing and helps buyers negotiate. It is primed with four canned prompts:
Price Benchmarks
Negotiation Strategy
Compare Pricing
Find Alternative
I strongly encourage you to try it.
As you do so, think about how you might also use this as a sales person. Knowing how your buyer might negotiate can help you with your own negotiation and sales strategy.
Screenshot of Vender’s Ruth AI, October 24, 2025.
Ruth takes advantage of all of the pricing data that Vender has gathered over the years. AI agents need data, ideally their own sources of data, otherwise one would just use Perplexity or ChatGPT.
This is just one example of how buyers, and procurement, are making use of generative AI. Most of the buying process now takes place inside an AI application.
Problem framing – The AI system helps teams articulate what problems need to be solved by analyzing business objectives, performance data, and user inputs.
Requirements development – Generative AI translates the problem into detailed requirements, suggesting potential solution paths and forecasting likely outcomes.
Solution search – The system autonomously scans supplier databases, past performance metrics, and market data to identify partners who could best solve the problem.
Solution framing - Clarify how a solution will work in the buyer’s context, this sometimes includes preparing RFP (Request for Proposal) documents.
Evaluation – AI agents evaluate proposals, simulate cost-benefit scenarios, model value, set success criteria.
In many cases humans only come into the loop late in the evaluation process.Negotiation – Agents assist in negotiation by modeling alternative contract structures. And as we can see with Vendr Ruth, they can act a negotiation coaches.
Purchase - Today most major purchases require human-to-human interaction, but even that is changing.
Monitoring – Once a selection is made, AI automates transaction workflows and continuously monitors vendor performance against expected outcomes.
If your solution is not showing up across this AI enabled process you are going to be in trouble. What does this mean?
Value Transparency
The AI needs to be able to understand (and calculate) how your solution will create value for a specific user and their use case. Virtually all B2B SaaS companies fail at this. Some have light weight ROI calculators, mostly for lead capture, but even these are not configured in a way that the generative AIs can interact for them. Going forward, we are are going to need to provide the AIs with value models and examples that they canuse to estimate the value of a solution for a specific customer and use case.
Companies are beginning to craft pages meant for consumption by AI agents. One example is the on-demand market research platform Wynter. It has an AI information page designed to make it easy for AI to get the information that Wynter wants them to have.
Wynter page for AI bots. Accessed October 24, 2025.
One of the critical pieces of content for the buying process will be a value model. But not a generic value model or ROI calculator. It will have to be one specific to the buyer and its use case and be in a format that the generative AI agent or chatbot can use. The future of value communication is to create content for AIs.
See also When scarcity becomes abundance: value models everywhere.
Pricing Transparency
What goes for value also applies to pricing. Pricing models need to be online, clear, and parsable by AI.
Over the past few months we have scraped more than 2,000 pricing models as part of the valueIQ agent development program. Most of these pricing pages are opaque at some level. They provide partial information, try to get people to contact sales, and scatter value, package and pricing information across multiple sites. Very few B2B SaaS companies or AI agent companies provide pricing in a way that will let a buyer AI (or a human buyer for that matter) understand how much a solution will actually cost and then connect it to value. That may have been acceptable when humans led the buying process. It won’t work in the emerging world where AI and agents dominate the buying process.
B2B SaaS vendors need to put their full pricing models online, connect pricing models to value models, and do this in a way that generate AIs and agents can find and interpret this information. Companies that do not have set prices or pricing models will need to provide clarity about their pricing process. AIs will need to assess pricing and value at the Evaluation stage of the buying process and AIs are increasingly involved in Negotiation and Monitoring.
Recommendations
Add an AI friendly information page to your website, cover all of your products and solutions.
Map the AI supported buying process for your key customer segments. Your AI should be able to help you with this!
Add a formal value model to your website, one that an AI can read and interpret.
Add either a pricing model or a pricing process to your website.
Make sure that the connection between value and price is clear.
AIs are already making assumptions about your value and your pricing. Your buyers are already relying on these AIs in the buying process. Winning companies will shape this and not wait passively for it to happen to them.
Navigating the new pricing environment brought by AI agents? Contact us @ info@ibbaka.com
