Pricing intelligence: What frontier AI economics mean for builders and buyers

ODSC AI West 2026

Oct 27, 2026 · Time to be announced

Pricing is where strategy meets science. For businesses building with or on top of AI, pricing decisions made inside frontier labs directly shape their costs, product roadmaps, and competitive position. And for AI companies themselves, pricing is one of the most consequential and least understood strategic levers available. This session brings an insider perspective from the frontier to practitioners navigating these decisions in real time. Drawing on direct experience in product finance and strategy at Anthropic, where pricing decisions touch everything from token economics to enterprise packaging to model launch strategy, we'll examine what makes AI pricing fundamentally different from every pricing model that came before it, and what that means for the businesses consuming, building on, and competing with frontier AI. We'll cover what actually drives AI economics, and why token-based consumption models create cost structures that behave nothing like SaaS. We'll look at how frontier labs think about the trade-offs between simplicity and sophistication in pricing design, why complex pricing can be a one-way door in a still-evolving market, and how outcome-based models are beginning to reshape what value means in AI. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for evaluating AI pricing, concrete tools for making smarter budgeting decisions, and a clearer mental model of the strategic forces shaping how intelligence gets packaged and priced today.

Session status: scheduled

Official session / agenda

Saving a session is not registration. Check the official agenda for availability, eligibility and any additional fees.

Speakers and their event affiliations

• Charu Maheshwari

  Affiliation at this event: Anthropic

Parent event

Hybrid · Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport, Burlingame, California, United States

This describes the parent event. Confirm the session’s attendance requirements with the organizer.

Companies participating in the parent event

These are event-level relationships, not confirmed sponsorship of this session.

• AGI House · Speaker company Source
• Ambiguous AI · Speaker company Source
• Anthropic · Speaker company Source
• Apollo Research · Speaker company Source
• Archer · Speaker company Source
• Audible · Speaker company Source
• Bechberger Consulting · Speaker company Source
• BGB Group · Speaker company Source
• BlackRock · Speaker company Source
• Blitzscaling Ventures · Speaker company Source
• Clair Sullivan & Associates, LLC · Speaker company Source
• CodeRabbit · Speaker company Source
• Cognizant · Speaker company Source
• Cohere Labs · Speaker company Source
• Comet · Speaker company Source
• CoreWeave · Speaker company Source
• Cursor · Speaker company Source
• CXAI · Speaker company Source
• Daily · Speaker company Source
• Data Driven Intuition · Speaker company Source
• Datasaur · Speaker company Source
• DataSQRL · Speaker company Source
• Daytona · Speaker company Source
• eBay · Speaker company Source

Showing 24 of 90 company relationships. View all on the event page.