The Agentic Work Unit (AWU)

Episode notes

Salesforce made waves in February 2026 by introducing the Agentic Work Unit, or AWU, as a new way to measure and potentially price AI agent activity. The Metrics Brothers, Ray "Growth" Rike and Dave "CAC" Kellogg dig into whether the AWU is a legitimate step toward outcome-based pricing, a vendor-specific adoption metric, or just another awkward intermediate measure in the long, messy history of software pricing models. Episode Highlights: Tokens are not business metrics. Ray and Dave open by drawing a clear line: tokens measure text processing and compute consumption, not business outcomes. Nobody walks into a board meeting announcing they processed 14 billion word fragments, and enterprise buyers should not be priced on that basis. What Salesforce is actually trying to do with the AWU. Defined as "one discrete task accomplished by an AI agent," the AWU is Salesforce's attempt to bridge the gap between low-level compute metrics and business outcomes. The hosts debate whether it is a pricing metric in waiting, an AI adoption signal, or simply the best available approximation of work performed by agents. A short history of bad pricing units.

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