Selling agents into industrial markets.

Manny Medina sits down with Sonia Kapoor of IFS to unpack how the oldest industries on the planet are demanding outcome-based pricing for AI agents, and how to get there.

Episode summary

Industrial buyers are demanding outcomes, not licenses.

Sonia Kapoor built The Loops, sold it to IFS, and now leads their agentic AI push into manufacturing, oil and gas, and aerospace. Customers pay per PO processed and per work order. One customer saved 90,000 hours and $3M per year from a single digital worker.

90K hrs

Saved annually by one oil and gas customer's material replenishment digital worker

$3M

Annual cost savings from a single digital worker at an 800-person organisation

20-40%

Revenue growth for AI companies switching to outcome-based pricing within 6 months

Key moments from the episode

How did The Loops get started, and why did IFS buy it?

Paid was built for exactly this billing model.

You define a Signal for each outcome your digital worker delivers, whether that is a PO processed or a work order closed. Paid meters those Signals and builds the billing logic around them automatically.

01

Signals: bill for outcomes, not API calls

Define PO processed or work order completed as discrete billable events. Paid tracks every one.

02

Hybrid contracts: subscription plus outcomes

Combine your annual contract floor with per-outcome charges. One billing engine handles both.

03

No-code pricing iteration as you learn

You started at $10 and realized customers would pay $100. Change pricing without touching code.

How do you show the board the ROI of each digital worker?

Give customers live proof, not a quarterly spreadsheet.

Paid's ROI Blocks are embeddable dashboards your end-customers see inside your product. They show exactly how many POs were processed, hours saved, and money recovered, in real time. That is the artifact your customer takes to their board.

Paid.ai ROI dashboard with natural language query bar for agent ROI analysis

Value Receipts close the loop automatically.

At the end of every billing period, Paid generates a Value Receipt: an automated summary of every outcome delivered. Your customer gets tangible proof, you get a defensible renewal conversation.

Can Paid track costs across every AI provider your workers use?

Real-time margin visibility across every LLM your agents use.

Paid automatically tracks costs from 50+ AI providers and maps them against revenue per workflow. The result is your Agentic Margin Ratio: profitability per digital worker, per customer, in real time.

Paid.ai metering view showing individual agent events, token usage, and per-call costs
How fast can IFS go from instrumentation to live billing?

Drop-in SDKs. Billing live in days, not quarters.

Paid ships drop-in SDKs for Python, Node.js, Go, and Ruby, plus native OpenTelemetry support. Instrument your Signals once, then iterate pricing with no code changes required. No re-deploys every time you want to test a new price point.

Approach
Time to billing
Pricing changes
Build in-house
3-6 months
New sprint
Paid SDK
Days
No code
Legacy billing tools
Weeks
Limited

What customers like you are saying

The shift from seats to outcomes is already happening.

Early adopters of outcome-based pricing via Paid reported 20-40% revenue growth within six months. The pattern is consistent: instrument the outcomes, prove the value, expand fast.

"Paid quantified the outcomes we delivered and gave us the confidence to price on results."

Jaspar Carmichael-Jack

CEO · Artisan

20-40%

Revenue growth for early outcome-pricing adopters within 6 months

90K hrs

Saved annually by one IFS oil and gas digital worker deployment

$3M

Annual cost savings from a single material replenishment digital worker

Things to know before buying

What does Paid actually cost?

Core billing is free. You pay as your volume grows.

The Free tier covers up to $10k monthly billing volume and 100k Signals at no cost. The Launch tier is $1,000/month and supports up to $100k in volume. Enterprise pricing is custom and includes dedicated engineering support and unlimited volume.

Tier
Monthly cost
Billing volume
Signals
Free
$0
Up to $10k
100k
Launch
$1,000
Up to $100k
1M
Enterprise
Custom
Unlimited
Unlimited
How long does implementation actually take?

Instrumentation is fast. Pricing iteration is even faster.

Your engineers instrument Signals using Paid's drop-in SDKs or OpenTelemetry. Most teams are live within days. After that, pricing changes require zero code changes and you iterate from the dashboard as you learn what your customers will pay.

The billing layer should not slow your deployment.

You mentioned going from nothing to live in three months at IFS. With Paid, billing is not the bottleneck. The Enterprise tier includes forward-deployed engineering to get you live faster.

Does Paid meet industrial-grade compliance requirements?

Built for enterprise compliance from day one.

Paid is certified for SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO. We offer a 99.5% uptime SLA with 24/7 technical support. For industrial deployments where deterministic outputs are non-negotiable, reliability is not an afterthought.

99.5%

Uptime SLA guaranteed

24/7

Technical support included

4 certs

SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO certified
What does Paid not do, and what adaptation is still needed?

Paid handles the billing rails. Your team defines what counts as value.

Just as 65-70% of your agent workflows come out of the box and 30-35% require customer adaptation, Paid provides the infrastructure. You still define your Signals to match your specific workflows. You bring the domain knowledge.

Paid integrates with, not replaces, your payment processor.

Paid layers on top of Stripe or similar providers for payment processing. We replace the metering and logic layer, not the payment rails. If you already use Stripe, that relationship stays intact.

Next steps

A clear path from this conversation to live outcome billing.

You have the vision and customers already asking for outcome-based pricing. The next step is connecting that vision to the infrastructure that can meter, bill, and prove it.

Step
Who
When
Pricing strategy call
Sonia + Paid team
This week
Map 1 workflow to Signals
IFS eng + Paid
Week 1-2
Pilot go-live
Joint
Week 2-4
Review margins, iterate pricing
Sonia + Paid
Ongoing
Paid.ai analytics dashboard showing total revenue, cost, and revenue forecast with AI assistant