With AI agents, the cost question is shifting.
What is your company actually paying for in the end?
Starting December 3, 2026, ATLASSIAN will charge for its customer service agent per “AI agent resolution.” Companies will not pay for tokens or individual model calls, but for a case counted as resolved.
At first, this sounds like a clearer link between cost and performance.
It becomes more interesting when we ask when such a resolution actually exists.
At ATLASSIAN, the agent must provide a complete answer without handing the case over to a human — and a system-level LLM judge must classify the case as resolved. These conditions together define the billable unit.
INTERCOM shows another version of the same shift. Different outcomes can be billed. What counts as a resolution or qualification follows operational criteria; in some cases, the customer can configure these criteria.
This creates a new path between the desired effect and the invoice:
Desired effect → success definition → observable evidence → classification/validation → billable outcome → payment
This path is not neutral.
A system can correctly determine that the defined criteria for an outcome have been met. That does not yet establish that the effect the company actually wanted has occurred.
A support case, for example, may count as resolved under the agreed rules. But for the company, success may also mean that the problem was actually fixed, the customer does not return with the same issue, and no follow-on costs arise.
DELOITTE now addresses this boundary in outcome-based contracts for agentic software as well: successful outcomes need to be defined with sufficient specificity and be verifiable against agreed criteria or procedures when payment and revenue recognition depend on them.
Outcome pricing therefore changes the buyer’s verification task.
Not only:
What does an outcome cost?
But:
Who defines what counts as success? Who classifies it? What evidence can your company inspect?
And ultimately:
Is the outcome you are paying for actually a valid proxy for the effect you wanted to achieve?