Turning AI Tokens Into ROI (That You Can Measure) | CEO @ Paid, Manny Medina

Manny Medina, Co-Founder and CEO of Paid, the monetization platform for AI agents, and the founder who took Outreach from nothing, joins Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zaman in person on how to price AI agents once seats stop making sense. Topics include why every SaaS company needs its own agents before someone else's run on its MCP layer, why a token is the wrong unit of value, and the itemized phone bill every agent builder owes its buyers. Plus, why fixed-price deals win logos but stall expansion, the case for 40% to 60% gross margins in the agent era, and what Satya Nadella told Manny in a green room.

Key Takeaways:

- Price the work your agent does, not the seats it fills. In SaaS you sell 100 seats, procurement sees 20 in heavy use, and the renewal shrinks to 50. With agents, "if you've sold 100 seats and only 2 were hyper-users, you don't care because you're charging for all the uses and all the value those 2 seats were getting." For now that pricing lives between effort and output, because true outcome pricing needs attribution, and as Manny put it, "Attribution is really hard."

- Make the bill readable before you argue about ROI. Manny compares it to the old itemized phone bill, where you went straight to the biggest line and asked, "Did I really call Pakistan from New York?" Tokens can't play that role: "A token should not be a unit of value for charging because a token is really kind of like the inside secret." Show the buyer the research, deck, or analysis the agent produced, because "explainability is like the first rung in the ladder."

- Fixed pricing is easy money that boxes you in at renewal. Enterprises are buying one of each right now, so "new logo is not hard. Expansion is hard." Teams that land logos on fixed price hit the first renewal with nowhere to go, which is why Paid opens with a monetization consultant and takes a percentage of revenue: "You grow, I grow." - Plan for thinner margins and narrower markets. Manny learned Amazon's margins cold (books 20%, electronics 7%, jewelry 3%) and calls SaaS's 70 to 80% an anomaly of cheap money: "I feel like a normal, you know, software business will be running on 40% margins, 60% tops."

Connect with the Hosts & Guests:   Host: Sam Jacobs, CEO at Pavilion - https://www.linkedin.com/in/samfjacobs/ Host: AJ Bruno, CEO at QuotaPath - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajbruno3/ Host: Asad Zaman, CEO at STA - https://www.linkedin.com/in/azaman1/ Guest: Manny Medina, Co-Founder & CEO at P