Why Is Vanta Paying for Customers' AI Tokens?

Christina Cacioppo says Vanta is eating the AI token cost and taking a lower margin. Customers notice a markup and compare it with the model itself, so marking tokens up is a comparison the product loses. About 25 percent of customers are already in the flow where an agent goes off and does the work, and she wants that at 75 percent. Retention and the experience come first. Price can wait until the usage is real.

The end state she wants is outcome pricing, getting paid for the result. Everyone she talks to wants that, and she likes the alignment from her years teaching microeconomics. Patrick O'Shaughnessy separates a closed support ticket, an output, from the outcome the customer actually wanted. The hard part is agreeing on a unit of work. A drafted document, a closed alert, or an offboarded account each sounds neat, and then there are dozens more. Users will not price every action. Charging the tokens puts the product against the model provider, and credits that hide a token exchange rate do not fool users either.