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 organisation20-40%
Revenue growth for AI companies switching to outcome-based pricing within 6 monthsKey moments from the episode
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.
Signals: bill for outcomes, not API calls
Define PO processed or work order completed as discrete billable events. Paid tracks every one.
Hybrid contracts: subscription plus outcomes
Combine your annual contract floor with per-outcome charges. One billing engine handles both.
No-code pricing iteration as you learn
You started at $10 and realized customers would pay $100. Change pricing without touching code.
Want to see how Signals map to IFS workflows?
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.
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.
Curious how ROI Blocks look in a product?
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.
Want to see margin ratio for your stack?
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.
Want a technical walkthrough for your stack?
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 months90K hrs
Saved annually by one IFS oil and gas digital worker deployment$3M
Annual cost savings from a single material replenishment digital workerThings to know before buying
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.
Want to scope the right tier for IFS?
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.
What would an IFS pilot look like?
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 guaranteed24/7
Technical support included4 certs
SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO certifiedNeed compliance docs for your security team?
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.
Want to map Paid to your exact IFS stack?
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.
Sonia, based on everything we covered:
