The seat was always a proxy
Software has priced per human for thirty years because humans were how you counted work. Give every agent its own computer and its own logins, and the proxy breaks.
Grok Bot ships a cloud computer per agent, sold through Cursor Teams Premium at $120 per seat per month. The product is persistent agents. The news is that a seat has stopped meaning a person.
Why per-seat worked
Per-user pricing was never really about users. It was a cheap proxy for how much work a customer extracted from a system, and it worked because headcount and work volume moved together. Vendors got a metric that was hard to game, buyers got a bill they could forecast, and both sides could sign a contract without instrumenting anything.
That proxy holds only while every worker is a person on payroll. It breaks the moment an account can run twelve agents overnight for the price of one login.
Two responses, both already visible
The first is to reprice the unit — agent-seats rather than user-seats. That is Grok Bot, and it is the honest version: if the agent is the worker, charge for the worker.
The second is to keep the seat as a cover charge and meter everything above it. That is where the coding tools have quietly gone, and the promotional credits masking it expire in September. A Copilot Enterprise seat already effectively costs $60/user before a token, with agent mode billed in metered credits on top.
Nobody is abandoning the seat. They are turning it into a subscription fee attached to a meter.
What buyers should do about it
Instrument consumption before September, not after. The variance in agentic spend comes from task difficulty rather than from headcount, which means last year's budgeting method has no predictive power. And note that most of the work can run on cheap models if something competent plans it — architecture is now a procurement decision.
The organisations that get hurt here are not the ones spending the most. They are the ones still forecasting from headcount.
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