Only 35% of CIOs have full visibility into their AI operating costs, according to a recent KPMG survey. That makes it difficult for them to control spend on software-as-a-service offerings from vendors who, like Workday, have incorporated pay-as-you-go agentic AI into their offerings. Workday is one of several vendors that have shifted to a have usage or token budgets in place.
The changes Monroy described are part of an industry trend, according to . The number of credits included varies by company size. But on top of that, they also purchase a subscription for additional Flex Credits that can be applied to any product they subscribe to.
Flex Credit usage is monitored through the Platform Consumption Console, which generates alerts when consumption hits 80%, 90% and 100% of subscribed credits. Use is metered when a task is completed.
However, one Flex Credit doesn’t necessarily equal one action. Workday’s listing the credits used by actions performed by the Sana platform and by self-service agents.
The good news is that, though Workday’s console counts credits used in both production and pre-production environments, only those used in production are charged for, offering an early budgeting reality check and a chance to tweak processes before they land in production. Pre-production usage count is only in aggregate, however, so if a customer wants to size a specific agent, the best approach is to run it in a defined window or dedicated test tenant and compare usage before and after the test.
Use them or lose them
The bad news is that Flex Credits expire after one year, and any left in a subscription do not roll over to the next; it’s a use them or lose them situation.
If, on the other hand, a customer exceeds their Flex Credit balance during the year, Workday said it does not just turn off their agents or other access to services. Instead, Workday’s account teams “partner with them to reconcile usage and help them purchase additional credits.”
Analysts agree that there are pros and cons to this new market reality.
“Workday’s Flex Credits are part of a broader shift we’re seeing across SaaS,” said , advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, “The Workday Flex Credits Rate Card seeks to quantify consumption of Flex Credits to specific value-added actions that are AI agent-driven. Many other vendors in the ERP space have created incredibly complex, multi-layered consumption models, leaving their customers’ heads spinning as they seek to decipher how capacity will be consumed, much less if it can add value.”
Brue, too, approved of Workday’s model, although she said that a core issue with AI pricing today is that vendors are each defining their own units, with no common measurement across platforms. This gives vendors pricing flexibility, but makes customers do extra work to create meaningful metrics like cost per resolution or cost per process run, just to keep budgets and ROI under control.
“Workday’s Flex Credits are a smart move for Workday because they align revenue with AI usage, but from the buyer’s side, they raise the bar on FinOps and governance,” she said. “You need clear dashboards, guardrails, and forecasting, or that flexibility can quickly turn into a budget black hole.”
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