Research
Data we compiled because we wanted it and could not find it. Free to use, free to cite, free to embed.
Most numbers in this market are laundered. A practitioner’s offhand estimate becomes a blog post, the blog post becomes a “study”, the study becomes a statistic that everyone quotes and nobody can trace. By the fourth hop the figure has lost its sample size, its date and its definition, and gained an air of authority it never earned.
We know because we tried to trace several of them and could not. There is a widely-repeated claim about AI pilot failure rates that appears in the wild as five different percentages, all attributed to the same source. There is a cost-per-interaction figure quoted as a market benchmark that turns out to be a hypothetical inside a consulting framework — the paper says so, in the paragraph everyone stops reading before. We do not use either, and the pages below say which findings we killed and why.
The rules these are compiled under
- Read the primary source, quote it verbatim. If a vendor’s page says “from $0.09 per minute”, that is what the row says — not our paraphrase, and not a monthly figure we derived by picking a usage assumption.
- Date every figure. Prices change without notice. A number without the date it was read is a number you cannot check.
- If it is not published, record that it is not published. The absence of a price is itself a finding, and it is the most common one.
- Do not average across incomparable units. This is the rule that costs us the headline number everyone wants.
Why there is no “average price of an AI agent” here. Across the vendors we read, billing happens in 24 genuinely different units — per seat, per month, per credit, per resolution, per minute, per run. A mean across those is arithmetic performed on things that cannot be added. It would be the single most quotable number on this site and it would not mean anything, so it is not here.
AI Agent Pricing Index
What 38 AI agent vendors actually charge, read off their own pricing pages — including the 10 that publish no usable price anywhere, and the 32 that keep at least one tier behind "contact sales".
Revenue per employee benchmarks
US firms with 10–99 employees, by industry and employment band. US Census Bureau, reference year 2022, with the sectors where the revenue definition is not comparable flagged rather than quietly included.
Using these
Both datasets carry an embed snippet, so you can put the live table on your own site rather than screenshotting a number that will be wrong in six months. Cite them, argue with them, or tell us where a figure is out of date — the sources are named on every row precisely so that you can check.
If you are here because you are trying to work out what a build would cost you rather than what vendors charge in general, the cost calculator and the guide to what drives that cost are the more direct route. The ROI calculator does the other half of the question.