Zendesk has rethought service pricing in an AI-first era beyond the evolution from seat-based to token-based pricing – the company now commits to outcome-based pricing marking one of the most important commercial shifts in the enterprise AI market.

Announced during the company’s annual Relate conference, the new model charges customers only when its AI systems have successfully revolved support interactions.

The company said every resolution would be independently verified with its own dedicated AI evaluation model, meaning that low-value exchanges would be excluded from billing.

The pioneering move reflects growing pressure across the AI industry to prove tangible business value rather than simply showcasing model capabilities for high and often wasted costs. With organisations now becoming more cautious about AI spend, vendors are increasingly being asked to demonstrate measurable ROI instead of charging for access alone, and Zendesk’s shift in pricing model holds the company accountable to pass on ROI to customers.

However, what this means in terms of revenue is less clear. For years, SaaS companies have largely relied on predictable subscription pricing tied to the number of users or licenses.

Zendesk’s approach effectively treats AI agents as digital workers whose compensation depends on measurable outcome, rather than availability. For Zendesk’s customers, it means they’ll only pay when meaningful work is completed.

As Shashi Upadhyay, President of Product, Engineering, and AI, put it in an interview at the event: “Stop thinking of agents as software… start thinking of them as a unit of labour.”

This marks the first time that a company like Zendesk could risk incurring costs without being able to recuperate them from clients, and it marks a major turning point for revenue models in general. The implications could extend far beyond customer service, as companies are expected to experiment with pricing tied to sales conversions, resolved tickets, completed workflows, productivity improvements and other outcomes.

This new strategy also reflects the growing competition within enterprise AI – looking ahead, pricing innovation may become just as important as model performance in acquiring and retaining customers.

So while Zendesk may be among the first to implement such pricing at scale, it offers a glimpse into how AI software could likely be commercialised in the future.

Workers are struggling to understand how to best use AI tools for their daily tasks due to a widening disconnect between employers and their employees, new research has claimed.

A new study from Mitel found that AI tools are often misaligned with how employees actually work, leading to widespread frustration.

This is leading many workers to bring in their own familiar tools from outside of work, potentially opening up their organisation to security threats and other risks.

The study found 71% of workers admitting to have used non-approved communication tools for work-related purposes, increasing the risk of the likes of data exposure, compliance breaches, cybersecurity threats, and a loss of visibility and control.

A similar proportion (71%) said they felt pressured to just “make it work” with tools not designed for their needs, showing the apparent disconnect or disinterest from senior management.

Overall, while just over half (51%) of workers said they regularly use AI tools, only 37% reported feeling very comfortable using them in their day-to-day work – with 70% saying they felt their organisation does not adequately support AI use.

“Organisations are making significant investments in AI, communication infrastructure, and modernisation,” said Eric Hanson, CMO at Mitel. “Yet more than half of employees report that these tools fall short at the moments that matter most.

“The challenge is not a lack of technology, but a lack of alignment with the realities of work. In fast-moving, high-pressure, and increasingly mobile environments, communication must be immediate, reliable and context-appropriate — or it risks breaking down precisely when it is needed most.”

“Closing the experience gap is now essential to reclaiming control and ensuring that communication investments translate into real-world performance and impact.”

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is taking a closer look at Microsoft’s business software empire, launching a strategic market status investigation into the company’s ecosystem.

The probe, which is the fourth since the UK’s digital markets competition regime came into force last year, will determine whether Microsoft should be designated as having strategic market status, which would allow the CMA to implement interventions to support competition.

In March, the CMA announced that the investigation was coming. The regulator was concerned that Microsoft’s software licensing practices were reducing competition in the cloud.

In the most recent announcement, the CMA said it had “heard that UK customers may not always be able to effectively combine software from Microsoft with that of other providers, limiting their ability to get access to the best products at the most competitive prices.”

Microsoft is no stranger to regulatory friction. In 2025, it described calls from AWS and Google for the UK competition regulator to “intervene and constrain the price” it charges customers to run wares on those rivals’ cloud platforms as “extraordinary and unprecedented.”

Two year prior, Google branded Microsoft’s cloud software licensing a “tax” paid by customers as a penalty for not running Microsoft software on Azure infrastructure. It claims that Microsoft charges up to four times more, for example, to run Windows Server on GCP. AWS has previously moaned about this too.

As well as assessing whether Microsoft is using its position to limit customer choice, the CMA investigation “includes looking at how AI competitors are able to integrate with Microsoft’s business software, giving customers access to AI software across suppliers to best suit their needs.”

Microsoft is pushing Copilot AI into as many Microsoft 365 subscriptions as it can, even creating a new tier, E7, aimed specifically at AI services.

In a statement, Nicky Stewart, senior advisor to the Open Cloud Coalition – a trade association Microsoft previously dismissed as a Google lobby group – said:

“This investigation needs to be both rapid and conclusive. It must address Microsoft’s unfair licensing practices once and for all, giving the UK cloud market a level playing field and the confidence to innovate and invest for the long term.”

Readers should not expect results anytime soon. It took 21 months for the CMA to publish the results of an investigation into the UK cloud services market, in which it said Microsoft and AWS were using their dominance to harm UK cloud customers. It claimed Microsoft, for example, could have charged UK enterprise customers £500 million more annually to run its wares in AWS and Google clouds than they’d have paid to run them in Azure.

A key concern from that investigation – whether Microsoft’s software licensing practices were reducing competition in cloud services – has informed this one.

This latest inquiry must be completed within nine months, and a decision on designating Microsoft with SMS is scheduled to be reached by February 2027.

For its part, a Microsoft spokesperson said “We are committed to working quickly and constructively with the CMA to facilitate its review of the business software market.”

The investigation will be wide-ranging, encompassing productivity applications, operating systems, databases, and security software.

Sarah Cardell, Chief Executive of the CMA, said, “Our aim is to understand how these markets are developing, Microsoft’s position within them and to consider what, if any, targeted action may be needed to ensure UK organisations can benefit from choice, innovation and competitive prices.”

Authorities in the US, Europe, Brazil, South Africa and Japan are also closely monitoring Microsoft’s licensing policies.

Organisations that decide to reduce their VMware footprints, or quit entirely, will emerge with more complex and less capable infrastructure.

That’s the view of Paul Delory, a research vice president with analyst firm Gartner, who told the company’s IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in Sydney that there is no technical reason for VMware users to adopt a rival hypervisor, and that no vendor offers a one-for-one replacement for the virtualisation pioneer’s flagship Cloud Foundation (VCF) suite.

But Delory said Broadcom’s licensing policies, which see it only sell VCF, mean VMware users’ licensing bills typically rise by 300 to 400 percent. Broadcom argues that the full-stack private clouds VCF makes it possible to build are so efficient that VCF quickly pays for itself.

The analyst told the conference he thinks those contemplating a move off VMware will do better if they instead focus on application modernisation. But he said Broadcom’s price changes, and the prospect the company might hike prices again in future, mean many VMware users will look elsewhere.

Those who do, he warned, will end up with more complex infrastructure for two reasons.

One is that few organisations will be able to quit VMware entirely, as they run applications with dependencies that aren’t easy or economical to unwind. Reducing or eliminating a VMware rig therefore means adopting multiple replacements, which creates more infrastructure to manage and therefore extra complexity.

The other is that no rival hypervisor can match the efficiency or VM density possible when using VMware’s products, so moving means acquiring more hardware.

Delory said the best alternatives to VMware are the public cloud, or HCI vendors – these days that acronym denotes both hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid cloud infrastructure.

The analyst warned that HCI vendors, with the exception of Nutanix, have weak migration tools that will leave users needing to create bespoke migration automations using “Ansible and a Rube Goldberg machine.”

Public clouds, he said, will welcome customers who move 1,000 or more VMs with free migration services.

He recommended against considering OpenStack, which he said remains “too big, too complex, and has too many moving parts for the typical IT shop to handle effectively.”

Delory also warned VMware users that migration projects are significant engineering undertakings that require extensive assessment of every application in a fleet to determine its best destination, and the work required to get it there.

He reminded VMware users that not every workload is certified to run under non-VMware hypervisors, and that some vendors now offer cloud-native versions of their wares and therefore offer an easier on-ramp to containerised applications.

Delory advised exploring those options, and not making architectural decisions that mean you can’t consider moving off VMware.

“VMware is betting that you can’t move off and they can jack the price way up,” he said. “That may be a good bet. But don’t make it easy.”

The analyst finished his talk by predicting most users will minimise their VMware footprints, rather than eliminating them, and restated Gartner’s prediction that 35 percent of workloads currently running under VMware will operate on a different platform by 2028.

More than 20,000 SAP customers are “stuck” on legacy ECC systems due to customisations, according to the CEO of SAP partner MyWave, Geraldine McBride, and many won’t migrate anytime soon. At Sapphire 2026, SAP offered them a path to AI, but only if they commit half their maintenance spend to the cloud first.

The offer, confirmed by SAP Chief Strategy Officer Sebastian Steinhaeuser during a media briefing, enables SAP to extend limited AI capabilities to customers still running its software on-premises during their transition to cloud ERP. But it comes with a significant condition: Customers must shift at least 50% of their maintenance spending to the cloud before they can enable Joule assistants on premises.

It’s a another small crack in SAP’s resolve: For years, it has been upsetting customers using its legacy systems by telling them the only way to access its latest innovations is to migrate to its latest platform, S/4HANA, in the cloud.

“There’s no confusion at all” about the latest change, said Steinhaeuser. “To be super clear, our Joule assistants and agents are designed for cloud. This is destiny and destiny is unchanged. […] However, we also want to meet customers where they are. We’ve put in a lot of work technically to make Joule available to ECC and S/4 customers who have committed to their journey.”

An SAP spokesperson confirmed the 50% requirement and said the company has no plans to extend the ECC end-of-service deadline beyond 2027, with extended support available through 2030 at additional cost.

For customers already on SAP’s Cloud ERP Private offering, the deal is sweeter. SAP will activate up to three Joule Assistants at no additional cost to cover common workflows in finance, HR, and the supply chain. New customers will be guided through activation during onboarding; existing customers can contact their SAP representative.

A proposed class action lawsuit alleges that TeamViewer has misleadingly sold “perpetual” licenses for its remote computer access software, given that it has withdrawn internet-based connectivity for legacy versions, leaving users with a “materially diminished” product unless they buy it again or upgrade their subscription.

The 17-page lawsuit contends that TeamViewer, which offers remote-from-anywhere access to computers outside of a user’s network without complex network configuration, sold “perpetual” licenses for TeamViewer Versions 11 and 12 that were later cut off from the software’s servers and network, stripping the product of its core remote-access functionality.

According to the class action lawsuit, TeamViewer’s “perpetual” licenses were sold on the basis that, after one “substantial” upfront payment, customers would have continued access to remote-access functionality through TeamViewer-controlled servers. Per the case, TeamViewer enables device identity, authentication, session negotiation, and NAT/firewall traversal for remote sessions over an internet connection, allowing users to connect to devices outside of their Local Area Network (LAN). Each of these services required an ongoing connection to TeamViewer’s servers and infrastructure, the suit stresses.

The filing contends that after shifting toward a subscription-based model, TeamViewer unfairly implemented an “end-of-support” action that unilaterally denied TeamViewer Versions 11 and 12 access to its servers and network, rendering the software “unable to perform its essential intended use.” As a result, consumers with “perpetual” licenses have been left with LAN-only connectivity and the “resulting pressure” of being unable to work remotely until they purchase another subscription or upgrade.

The lawsuit says that TeamViewer’s decision to remove legacy versions of its software from its network ecosystem is more egregious than simply ending updates or customer support, given that consumers are left with LAN-only connectivity despite paying for remote-access functionality, the “defining” feature of the product.

“TeamViewer’s attempt to characterise the resulting ‘LAN-only’ connectivity as a continued benefit is misleading and commercially unreasonable,” the suit argues.

Consumers widely understood “perpetual” to mean more than simply the retention of the right to “run a local executable,” and that continued remote-access use was the “essential” purpose of the license, per the case.

As the complaint tells it, TeamViewer has failed to provide consumers with meaningful compensation—such as partial refunds or credits—to reimburse them for the license’s premium price.

The plaintiff purchased TeamViewer based on the representation that the perpetual license was a “paid-up” alternative to a subscription service, and paid a total of $2,799 for the software license. The complaint relays that when the plaintiff made his purchase, he did not expect that TeamViewer would later “extinguish” the software’s intended use by removing access to its servers.

The TeamViewer class action lawsuit seeks to cover all individuals and entities in the United States who purchased a perpetual license to TeamViewer Version 11 or Version 12.

It’s not possible to operate a completely sovereign cloud outside of China or the USA, according to Douglas Toombs, a VP analyst at Gartner.

Speaking at the analyst firm’s IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in Sydney, Toombs said only the US and China make all the tech needed for a sovereign cloud. Buyers elsewhere can’t avoid relationships with foreign providers.

Toombs said that while US-based cloud vendors have created products they say can meet the needs of organisations that need a cloud that doesn’t have legal entanglements outside their chosen jurisdiction, the fact they’re ultimately owned by American corporations means it’s not possible to be certain a cloud provider can promise complete sovereignty.

Even on-prem clouds like AWS Outposts, Azure Local, or Oracle’s Dedicated Cloud Regions, “need to phone home,” he said.

The analyst doesn’t think attempts to create sovereign clouds will succeed. He mentioned past French attempts to create sovereign clouds named “Andromeda”, “Numergy,” and “Gaia-X”, which he says went nowhere – but did produce some nice white papers.

He also cited the The Rule of Three and Four, a maxim developed by Boston Consulting Group that asserts “A stable competitive market never has more than three significant competitors, the largest of which has no more than four times the market share of the smallest,” and argued that it predicts the cloud market has settled around AWS, Google, and Microsoft.

Toombs allowed that some smaller clouds could thrive and will make it feasible to create sovereign SaaS providers and products.

But he thinks that even aggressive moves to go on-prem won’t free organisations from dependency on US-owned clouds, an assertion he backed with the example of a Dutch healthcare provider that tried to build its own infrastructure but then experienced an outage when a supplier’s services went down along with a major cloud provider.

If sovereign clouds fail to develop, it may be problematic because some European organisations are worried US-based cloud operators might leave the continent, forcing them into hasty and risky migration projects, according to Adrian Wong, a Gartner Director Analyst who also spoke in Sydney.

Wong said “heightened geopolitical tensions” are causing customers of major clouds to rethink their strategies, a decision he welcomes because he sees very few organisations bother to develop a cloud exit strategy.

“Exit plans are overlooked,” he said, and users are “very much locked in” – especially when they use cloud-native services or platform-as-a-service.

“Exiting within a timeframe of anything less than two years takes significant planning and investment,” he warned. “Exit strategies and plans are largely swept under the rug.”

Wong says he is now seeing “the pendulum swing.”

Not developing a cloud exit strategy is one of the ten big mistakes Wong sees users make. Also on his list are starting use of clouds with mission-critical and complex applications like ERP, assuming the cloud is appropriate for all applications, and expecting to get all the benefits of the cloud with every application.

He also said it’s folly to assume that going multi-cloud will improve availability – unless users first tackle the more complex and expensive task of making applications portable. Wong said organisations that use multiple clouds should do so to access specific features of each, not to improve resilience.

VMware users considering a new home might find it cheaper to move to an IBM mainframe than adopting Broadcom’s new licenses, according to Gartner Vice President Analyst Alessandro Galimberti.

Speaking to discuss the analyst firm’s mid-April publication, “The State of the IBM Mainframe in 2026,” Galimberti said some buyers in many fields are comparing mainframes to modern environments and deciding Big Blue’s big iron comes out ahead.

“I can build a multi-region cloud application, but things like data synchronisation and high availability are things I need to build into application logic,” he said. “The mainframe has that in the platform, which shields developers from complexity.”

He also thinks mainframes are ideally suited to workloads that need many years of transactional consistency and backward-compatibility.

That said, Galimberti doesn’t recommend the mainframe for all applications. He said mission-critical applications that are unlikely to change much for a decade are best-suited to the machines, as are Linux applications because the open source OS runs on IBM’s hardware.

IBM also offers the z/VM hypervisor, which he says can make Linux “even better and more enterprise-ready.”

Which is why Galimberti thinks IBM’s ecosystem is attractive to VMware users, especially those who operate a fleet of 500 to 700 Linux VMs.

Galimberti said he has seen “multiple business cases” in which moving from VMware to IBM makes sense under Broadcom’s policy of requiring customers to buy its full Cloud Foundation private cloud stack. The analyst said he was surprised those business cases make sense, but insists a mainframe makes sense “under some circumstances.”

AI is another workload Galimberti thinks some users will find works well on mainframes, because IBM recently upgraded its Spyre accelerators

The analyst says items like Spyre show that IBM continues to invest and innovate, and that the mainframe “is not a stale platform.”

Galimberti said the idea that mainframes were a dead end has been around for decades and was justifiable at some moments in history. But he also feels the idea was oversold by consultants who promoted migrations away from mainframes as sure-fire winners – but under-estimated the complexity of a move.

“Global system integrators were always against the mainframe and encouraged migrations,” he said. “Now they are halting the mainframe exit, probably because the number of failures they had were more than their successes.”

The firm now advises assuming that by 2030, 75 percent of vendors offering mainframe exit services operating in the “mainframe exit” market will either change their businesses or vanish, and suggests that only 10 percent of mainframe users will want out by 2030.

Which is not to say mainframes are perfect or easy to live with. Galimberti noted that few third-party software developers support mainframes, and those that do understand the potential to hike prices.

Committing to mainframes therefore means planning “to spend time negotiating price and renewal protections, rather than prioritising the business value these solutions can deliver.”

Another downside is that mainframes pose clear lock-in risk, so users may hold back on useful customisations out of fear they make it harder to extricate themselves from the platform.

Access to skills remains an issue, too, as kids these days mostly don’t contemplate a career working with big iron. Galimberti sees more service providers investing in their mainframe programs, which might help. So does the availability of Linux.

The analyst thinks the mainframe will be around for some time to come, because IBM is “very engineering-focussed” and “engages with customers who are hyper-conservative” – then just creates the products they want.

The Coalition for Fair Software Licensing has published research showing that US workers reckon Microsoft is using its productivity tools to lock their employers into the company’s AI services.

The survey data of more than 1,000 workers – out a day before the release of Microsoft’s E7 AI bundle – found that three-quarters believed Microsoft was using its dominance in productivity software to push AI. More than half (57 percent) opposed their employer buying Microsoft’s E7 bundle.

Only a third of workers questioned said they preferred Microsoft as a vendor, while 78 percent reported they could do their jobs just as well with another vendor’s AI tool.

Perhaps that other tool is Google Gemini. Though the survey makes for difficult reading for Microsoft and Copilot enthusiasts, it also opens a new front in the war for productivity hearts and minds. Google has no official affiliation with the survey or the Coalition for Fair Software Licensing – but Microsoft, for one, has its suspicions.

In a 2024 blog entitled “Google’s shadow campaigns,” Rima Alaily, Microsoft’s general counsel for Infrastructure Legal Affairs, wrote, “We understand Google is a main funder of the US-based Coalition for Fair Software Licensing.”

The Coalition for Fair Software Licensing were asked about its ties with Google. A spokesperson said, “While the Coalition does not disclose our membership, our members span a cross-section of key industries, including healthcare companies, financial services businesses, as well as cloud and cybersecurity providers – each one has experienced or been exposed to anticompetitive and abusive software licensing practices in the cloud.”

Another source grumbled about Gemini, saying there is a risk that “Google is deploying the same playbook as when they were monopolising search.”

Google were asked for comment, but the company was unable to provide a statement before publication. Other than an acknowledgement of receipt, Microsoft has also not responded.

Ryan Triplette, executive director of the Coalition for Fair Software Licensing, said, “Microsoft’s decision to launch E7 on May Day is no coincidence. It should send a clear distress signal for any organisation already locked into the Microsoft ecosystem. For years, customers have borne the cost of that lock-in, paying a premium not for innovation, but simply for the ability to maintain flexibility. E7 is the latest extension of that model, and the reaction from workers underscores a growing reality: the cost is not justified.

“Despite Microsoft facing mounting regulatory scrutiny over its anticompetitive behaviour, we fully expect the company to deploy every tool in its playbook to force existing customers into this new bundle. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic should be watching closely and be poised to act quickly to protect customers.”

Microsoft is dominant in the office productivity space. Google Workspace has claimed a few high-profile scalps over the years, but some, such as European aerospace megcorp Airbus, have found the Microsoft habit a hard one to kick.

It is unsurprising, then, that critics have rung alarm bells over Microsoft pushing AI technology into enterprises that have already bought into its productivity ecosystem. Copilot has yet to deliver the productivity gains promised by evangelists, but Microsoft is heavily invested in the tech and determined it will be a success.

The survey data reflects wider unease among workers over AI tools being promoted through subscriptions like E7, and anxiety, perhaps, about an agentic future and what it means for their jobs. What it does not capture, however, is the thinking of those who will actually make the decisions: whether Microsoft holds its grip on office productivity into the AI age, or loses its crown to a rival.