Answers
What is Agent-as-a-Service (AaaS)?
The answer
Agent-as-a-Service is the delivery of working AI agents priced on outcomes — per resolution, per role, per result — rather than as software licences. The buyer rents a workforce, not a tool. It converts enterprise AI from a capital-expenditure experiment into an operating expense with a measurable cost per outcome.
The pricing shift is the story: Salesforce sells Agentforce conversations, outcome-priced service agents are displacing seat licences across support and operations, and every such contract forces a discipline the software era never required — the vendor must know its cost per outcome, and the buyer can compare it to a salary. The firm's full analysis, including contract structures and the margin question, is in its Agent-as-a-Service research note.
Around the delivery model sits the rest of the stack this register covers: orchestration to coordinate the fleet, a brain layer to hold context, agent-to-agent protocols to interoperate, and optimization to defend the margin. The firms that industrialize all four will be priced as infrastructure; the ones that resell model calls will not.