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Gives you the current benchmarks to set expectations with your board (roughly 45 to 53 percent depending on how much of the stack you own) and four concrete moves: pick a margin posture deliberately, meter cost per customer, route to cheaper models by default, price with usage.
AI Gross Margins: Why the 90% SaaS Benchmark Is Gone
From Jeff Brokaw by Jeff Brokaw 12 min read
- ICONIQ's survey of about 300 software executives puts AI product gross margins at 45 to 53 percent in 2026.
- The 90 percent SaaS margin was always mythology, 80 percent was the real industry assumption.
- Every AI request carries real variable cost: inference, retrieval infrastructure and human review.
- Cost curves diverge: a fixed capability gets 5 to 10x cheaper a year while frontier model pricing rises 3 to 18x.
