AI Leadership Forum And AI In Investment Banking
AI Leadership Forum And AI In Investment Banking
Publish Date: 2026-06-04 22:16:00
Source Domain: www.forbes.com
AI or Artificial intelligence concept. Businessman using computer use ai to help business and used in daily life, Digital Transformation, Internet of Things, Artificial intelligence brain, A.I.,
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Last week, TIME hosted the first-ever TIME100 AI Leadership Forum in New York.
The TIME100 AI Leadership Forum, the newest extension of TIME’s growing Leadership Forum series, convenes the world’s leading organizations building AI solutions across various fields ranging from investment banking and venture investing to healthtech and media.
The following are my reflections from the forum and an eventful week in AI investment banking.
The New Pricing Models
For the last three years, the conversations about AI have largely focused on efficiency: how to AI-enable organizations, how to move faster, how to do the existing work for less. Soon the conversation will turn to new solutions AI systems now make possible to build, and how to charge for them.
A few days ago, Ted Smith, co-founder and president of Union Square Advisors, joined Bloomberg’s The Close and discussed this shift. He compared this period to 2007, the year Union Square Advisors was founded, when the software industry was moving from the license-and-maintenance model to subscriptions. That transition was turbulent, Ted said, but the companies that doubled down on their core value propositions and worked through the pricing and revenue model changes came out the other side just fine. We are about to do the same thing with AI. The pricing model is going to change, and it will not be solely per-seat subscriptions anymore.
The data already shows the shift. In a survey of 240 software and AI companies, per-seat pricing fell from 21% to 15% of companies in a single year, while hybrid models, a base fee plus usage, rose from 27% to 41% to become the dominant approach. The reason is this: the seat was always a proxy for a person doing a job, and AI is cutting that link. At Alphabet, nearly 75% of new code is now…
