Navigating the K-Shaped Economy: Zoho’s Enterprise Strategy, AI, and True Value
During ZohoDay 2026 in Austin, I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Tony Thomas, the head of Zoho US. Tony has been in this role for just over a year, navigating an economic and technological landscape that got ever more complex. Our conversation covered everything from shifting macroeconomic realities and Zoho’s upward trajectory into the mid- and enterprise market, to the fundamental ways generative and agentic artificial intelligence are challenging the traditional economics of software implementation. With software pricing already being under pressure, it is more than likely that implementation costs are next. I said it before, the time-and-material billing that SI’s are still favoring is probably going the way of the Dodos. What became abundantly clear during this conversation was that Zoho continues to forge its own contrarian path, adapting to market pressures by continuing to rethink how software value is delivered. One could even say that Zoho’s thinking gets validated by current developments. TL;DR If you prefer watching the interview to reading, find the full video here. The Macroeconomic Squeeze on the SMB The software market does not exist in a vacuum, and the broader economic climate over the past year or so has been challenging for businesses. Historically, SMB segment has been Zoho’s mainstay. However, Tony noted that especially this demographic is facing severe headwinds. Tony pointed to the K-shaped economy, where large enterprises continue to see gains while smaller businesses and large segments of the populace are struggling or being left behind. Small businesses have “taken it on the chin“, battered by general economic uncertainty and the specter of tariffs, casting doubt on the speed of their recovery....
The Illusion of Value: Why Salesforce’s Agentic Work Unit is the New “Bad Query” of the AI Era
The News On February. 25, 2026, Salesforce announced a pricing and metrics update. During the company’s Q4 FY2026 earnings call, CEO Marc Benioff, together with CMO Patrick Stokes, unveiled the Agentic Work Unit (AWU). Positioned as a metric to quantify the labor performed by autonomous digital systems, Salesforce defines an AWU as one discrete task accomplished by an AI agent. According to Salesforce, this discrete task represents the exact moment “raw intelligence is converted into real work“. It is not a fixed unit but measured as a processed prompt, a completed reasoning chain, or an invoked tool. Salesforce explicitly designed the AWU to move the industry conversation away from the raw consumption of Large Language Model (LLM) tokens. As Benioff noted, tokens only measure “how much an AI talks,” whereas the AWU is intended to measure actual business execution. The scale of this rollout is massive. Salesforce reported that its platform has already processed over 19 trillion AI tokens, translating them into 2.4 billion Agentic Work Units, with 771 million AWUs delivered in the fourth quarter alone. This new metric serves as the underlying foundation for Salesforce’s evolving Agentforce monetization strategy. The bigger picture Following a nearly 18-month period of pricing triangulation, which included a $2.00 per conversation model and a $0.10 per action “Flex Credit” model, Salesforce is leveraging the AWU to track system utilization, even as it wraps enterprise purchasing in familiar, unmetered per-user license agreements starting at $125 per user per month. To understand the significance of the Agentic Work Unit, one must view it through the lens of a broader industry crisis: the so-called “SaaSpocalypse”...