Why Does Serval Price on Workflows Instead of Tokens?

Jake Stauch says Serval tries to price on workflows run, because that reflects actual work better than tokens, which track verbosity and inefficiency. CIO customers are pulling back from the initial token-maxing era. Adoption is still so early that the pullback will not become a clampdown in the aggregate. Spend is going to keep rising sharply because most companies are still at the beginning.

Each company goes through rapid early adoption and then a pullback of spend while trying to measure and calculate ROI. Long-term budget impact is not really the concern. Customers expect a short-term pullback and still plan on increasing spend. What they need is more proof of ROI, a way to show the spend is giving them something. He does not know that anyone has really figured out how to measure what the tokens deliver.

The opportunity is to show the work being done and equate it to work that would have been done in other platforms, with other cost models, or by labor. Customers ask for help proving the spend was worth it, and that proof is the assignment. Everyone is going to figure out different models of proving the work makes sense.