The artificial intelligence (AI) boom is forcing organizations to rethink their enterprise strategy, with pricing being a front-and-center aspect of this change. Therefore, the question that service providers are now faced with is, “How do we charge for a service whose value is dynamic, consumption is unpredictable, and whose costs can fluctuate wildly?”
As companies scramble to launch AI-powered products, their finance teams are often left dealing with legacy billing systems that can’t keep up. Addressing this key challenge, monetization platform Zuora recently announced a suite of powerful new capabilities that can help businesses translate AI usage into scalable revenue models.
Creating Scalable Models
The move comes as many organizations struggle to adapt. According to a recent survey, 71% of SaaS finance leaders report difficulties in scaling usage-based pricing models. This problem is only magnified by the complexities of AI. Moreover, customers are still learning how to interact with these new technologies, making consumption patterns difficult to forecast and monetize fairly.
Zuora’s enhanced platform aims to bring clarity to this chaos with three key upgrades:
- AI-powered consumption insights: The platform now uses AI to analyze customer usage patterns, helping businesses predict potential churn, accurately forecast revenue growth, and benchmark performance. This shifts finance from a reactive to a proactive role in guiding business strategy.
- Enhanced customer visibility: To build trust and reduce billing disputes, companies can now offer customers configurable widgets that provide real-time insight into their consumption. This includes daily usage metrics, current spend, and remaining balances, giving end-users the transparency they expect.
- Massive scalability: Recognizing that AI services can generate a torrent of micro-transactions, Zuora has boosted its processing power. The platform can now meter, rate, and bill up to three billion usage events per day, with a peak performance of 200,000 events per second. This ensures the billing engine can keep pace with exponential growth.
“Organizations everywhere are moving to outcome-based and usage-based models to monetize their most innovative products, especially as customers explore new AI technologies and better understand the value they deliver,” said Shakir Karim, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Zuora.
He added, “With Zuora, businesses can automatically turn events into pricing metrics that reflect real value, adapting with flexible offerings based on customer needs. Finance teams now have what’s necessary to guide the business, scale usage models confidently, and drive growth.”
What This Means for ERP Insiders
This announcement positions Zuora as a critical enabler for companies navigating the new AI economy. For ERP Insiders, this means:
- Move from reactive reporting to predictive forecasting. Zuora’s AI-powered consumption insights offer a glimpse into future trends as Zuora’s AI analyzes raw usage patterns to predict churn and forecast growth. This bridges the gap between the consumption front-end and the financial back-end, creating a more agile and intelligent forecasting process.
- Prevent revenue leakage and reduce DSO. Customer billing disputes create a cascade of manual work for the Accounts Payable team. However, Zuora’s enhanced solution enables teams to reduce this issue by providing customers with real-time dashboards that show exactly what they are using and what it costs. This transparency helps eliminate bill shock, which is the number one cause of billing inquiries. This means fewer disputes, a cleaner sub-ledger, less manual intervention, and a direct, positive impact on the Days Sales Outstanding (DSO). Additionally, when a customer does call, the team can have an informed, value-based conversation instead of a reactive, transactional dispute resolution.
- Protect your ERP core while you innovate. The scalability to handle three billion user events on its platform allows Zuora to act as a key mediation and aggregation layer. It does the heavy lifting of rating and summarizing small events into clean, billable charges. Only this processed, business-ready data is then passed to the ERP for invoicing and revenue recognition. This scalability allows an organization’s product teams to innovate freely on pricing models for new AI services. It also enables the financial back-end to handle the final accounting without being overwhelmed or requiring a costly, high-risk overhaul.
