A top IT consulting firm rips up its traditional billing playbook for the AI era

• Globant rolls out a radical new pricing model for AI-powered consulting services.
• Generative AI's high costs are pushing some companies to try different ways of billing customers.
• Globant's CEO called the move a radical departure from the way consulting usually works.

Globant, a large tech consulting firm, just ripped up its traditional billing strategy to more fully embrace AI use cases and projects.

This is a trend I told you about back in April. The generative AI boom is pushing companies to adopt different pricing models, partly because the latest models have become so expensive to use.

This is already taking hold in the SaaS industry. Now it is beginning to happen in consulting.

Globant, an IT services specialist that competes with Accenture and other consulting firms, is rolling out AI Pods, a subscription for AI-powered offerings including software engineering, product definition, design, and testing.

Clients can subscribe monthly to an AI Pod, and each subscription includes token-based capacity, similar to how some leading AI labs structure usage.

Every time a company taps into a major AI model, the prompts and other requests are broken down into "tokens," the new language of generative AI, which have to be processed. When complex projects are handled this way, the cost of token processing can add up quickly, especially if newer, "reasoning" models are used.

Traditional consulting projects often come with time-intensive billing structures: work is scoped, employees are assigned, and hours are tracked to calculate what to charge clients. But in the world of generative AI, where outputs are driven by token-based usage and cost varies depending on the models used, the old approach could create misalignment between providers and clients.

"This is a departure from the traditional effort-based approaches," Globant CEO Martín Migoya explained, describing the move as a "radical departure from what anyone else in our industry is offering."

Tokens versus effort

Globant's new AI Pods package this new reality into a managed-services model: for a monthly subscription fee, clients access a virtual workforce of AI agents supervised by Globant's human tech consultants. Each subscription comes with a certain number of tokens to use.

This is only a theoretical example and doesn't represent what Globant will actually charge clients, but you get the gist: A client might pay $20,000 a month and get 100 million tokens included in that subscription.

"My business is to create software for you, to create technology for you," Migoya added in an interview. "We're proposing a novel way of engaging, which is more connected to throughput rather than just the time and effort I'm consuming."

Migoya said the token limits are high, so Globant consultants and their clients have more than enough to get projects completed. If some customers blow through token allocations, Globant will work out solutions, but the goal is to keep pricing stable in this new generative AI era, while minimizing surprises, he explained.

"Streaming" consulting services

He called it "streaming engineering," likening it to how we pay a monthly fee to stream Netflix movies and TV shows. Instead of spinning up custom teams for every client need, customers now subscribe to digital capacity.

Under the hood, the AI Pods are powered by Globant Enterprise AI platform, which taps into different leading AI models.

The firm also uses its own agent framework, CODA, which automates aspects of code generation, testing, and deployment while ensuring high-quality enterprise output. This approach lets Globant reuse existing software components, which reduces the need to ping the underlying AI models (reducing those token-processing costs!).

Globant says the new model is already being used by clients in finance, entertainment, and energy. Early adopters include oil and gas company YPF and holding company JM Family Enterprises.

While subscription-based and token-based models have caught on in the SaaS world, Globant's move is a signal that enterprise consulting may be heading the same way.

The largest consulting firms, including Deloitte, EY, PwC, and KPMG, have been investing heavily in automation and AI over the past few years. Recently, Deloitte and EY announced new agentic AI platforms, both built in collaboration with Nvidia.

With AI redefining how software is built and deployed, billing just based on human time and effort may soon feel as outdated as dial-up internet.