Adapting your revenue structure in the AI era

For many climate businesses, revenue has traditionally been tied to service delivery: you’re paid by the hour, on retainer, or based on your output. But because automation tools can handle labor-intensive tasks much faster than before, AI is completely upending this model. If logging fewer hours means earning less, how can you take advantage of the efficiency gains AI brings without eroding your topline? 

Garrett Gerson is the co-founder and CEO of VARIANT3D.  In the 6th of our series in partnership with Unreasonable Impact, we sat down with him to discuss redesigning revenue, pricing on value over time, and adjusting your pricing as customers become reliant on your service.

Building a new billing model from scratch

Because billing by effort is the historical standard, customers are often firmly attached to retainers or hourly billing. That means if you show up with something completely different, it’ll likely meet with resistance, and you’ll have to educate the customer about the benefits. Reaching consensus among your team about the best way to approach this problem can also be extremely challenging.

But rather than trying to adapt your revenue structure to a market where it no longer makes sense, start by imagining this historical model doesn’t exist. What would your pricing structure look like if you were building it without this convention? Sit down with your team and run that exercise, then do the same with your clients, and adapt the strategy based on the feedback you get. You probably won't land on something that pleases everyone, but will eventually reach a place that works for your business.

Price on outcome rather than time 

One crucial shift is to start charging based on what the output is actually worth to the customer, rather than how long it takes to produce.

If a deliverable that previously took 80 hours now takes 10, the question isn't how to price those 10 hours. It's what value the client gains by having it that much faster, through helping them save money, make better decisions, and run a more profitable business. If they save $500K in development costs because you’ve given them a sample in a day rather than six weeks, what percentage of that should be priced in? Your goal is to find the outer bounds of what people are willing to pay, and price accordingly. 

This shift works even if what you’re delivering to the client is routine rather than value-adding. You might charge more per hour, and sell fewer hours. Or, even if AI lets you produce something in an hour, you don't have to deliver it in an hour. You can hold it, charge your standard rate, and offer a premium for faster turnaround at whatever the client thinks that’s worth. 

Sell capability over usage

For SaaS businesses, the temptation is often to price on the number of seats or how frequently the platform is used. But usage measures activity, not impact. A platform that allows one person to make a decision in a day – when it previously took a team a month – should base its value on what its use actually made possible. Pricing should reflect the capability the platform unlocks: shortened development cycles, waste avoided, smarter decisions made, and better operational outcomes.

Consider letting the customer define pricing

The outcomes that your customers care about are the ones that should be priced in. While offering custom pricing is trickier because you can’t provide a price sheet, making scoping more of a burden, it allows you to monetize in a way that can go beyond the market rate, because it’s specific to what that customer actually values.

Ensure price increases are easy to justify

Tie your price increases to metrics the customer is already tracking. If a company drops development time from six months to six weeks, or eliminates multiple rounds of iteration, that's measurable operational gain, and a natural basis for a pricing conversation. 

Similarly, as the service becomes more embedded inside the organization – to the point where it becomes mission-critical for the customer – the pricing model should expand to reflect this dependency. Have quarterly true-ups to discuss whether the current price still makes sense given how the relationship has evolved.

Sustainability is just a bonus

For many customers, the emissions reduction potential of your product will be icing on the cake rather than a driver of sales. The person approving your invoice is usually a CFO or finance lead, and they need an argument about cost savings, not the environment, so position it as a ‘free gift with purchase’.Make it sticky

The more painful that leaving would be for the customer, the stronger a position you’re in when it comes to pricing. If their version history and engineering notes live inside your system, the decision to move on is no longer based on price but about the disruption that leaving would bring.

Think about where a team’s institutional knowledge actually lives — their user stories, version histories, internal notes. When that context is stored inside your platform, it stops being software and starts being infrastructure. Nobody rips out infrastructure over a pricing conversation.

The same logic applies to workflow. Sitting with a team’s frustrations — really auditing what slows them down inside a targeted user story — yields the most valuable feedback for roadmapping and customer journey mapping. When you build directly from that, your product starts solving problems that are specific to how that team works. Switching at that point is no longer just a vendor swap. It means walking away from a tool that was shaped around them.

Garrett Gerson is the co-founder and CEO of Variant3D. After leading his family's hospitality business through a strategic digital transformation, he partnered with CTO and co-founder Will Samosir to develop LOOP — a patented software platform that enables faster design, iteration, and custom textile manufacturing at scale for global brands. By delivering digital infrastructure and automated workflows that accelerate time-to-market and unlock on-demand production, LOOP has become a core enabling technology for companies looking to drive innovation through faster product development, customization, and rapid prototyping capabilities. Garrett also serves on the boards of XPRIZE and Calamigos Ranch Corporation and has been an active YPO member for more than 20 years.