AI Pulse · Business Models & Winners

monday.com just gave us a real number to look at instead of another vague AI promise. On its Q2 earnings call, management said AI-related annual recurring revenue doubled from the previous quarter and now accounts for 70% of all new ARR the company is adding. That’s a big jump, and it came from a pricing model they rolled out in May, seat plus credit, where customers pay for their normal seats and then buy AI usage on top when they hit their cap.

Here’s why this matters beyond monday.com. Most SaaS companies have been guessing at how to charge for AI features. Bundle it into the price and eat the cost, or charge a flat AI add-on fee and hope people use it enough to justify it. monday.com’s approach lets usage set the price. Customers who barely touch the AI tools pay little extra. Customers who run AI heavily hit the cap and top up automatically. That’s a cleaner match between cost and value, and it’s now backed by a primary-source earnings call instead of a vendor’s marketing deck, as the original earnings transcript shows.

Worth staying grounded here though. AI revenue is still only about 1% of monday.com’s total ARR. This is early proof, not a finished trend. If you run a business that buys software with AI features baked in, or if you’re building your own tools, this is a model worth watching closely over the next few quarters. Seat-plus-credit pricing tends to reward companies that actually use AI to get work done, rather than just clicking a feature once. That kind of usage-based visibility into where AI spend is paying off is exactly the kind of thing we build into an AI command centre, so you can see what’s actually driving value before you scale it up.