Air Replaces ARR With AI Usage Metric, Makes Usage Billing Mandatory

Air has rebuilt its operating model around AI usage, replacing new ARR as its core metric with "action credit units" (ACU) and making usage-based billing mandatory for new and renewing customers. Co-founder and CEO Shane Hegde described the shift in a post on X, according to digitaltoday.co.kr.

Under the new model, customers receive a base AI allowance and pay extra beyond it, with charges tied to their use of AI features. Performance for marketing, sales and customer success is now measured by ACU, and a graph of the metric is posted to an internal channel at 9 a.m. each day.

Air also replaced its customer success managers with forward-deployed engineers, whose evaluation now depends on how much customers use the company's AI features. The design-then-develop process has been removed so that engineers build first, and decision authority has moved to smaller product teams.

According to the figures Hegde shared, ACU grew 15-fold over the last five months, and usage in the last 48 hours exceeded all of September. October ACU is expected to rise at least 4-fold month over month, while growth doubled and new ARR tripled over the past year.

From 'mediocre SaaS' to an AI-native model

Earlier this year, Air grew more than 50% with solid customer retention, but board member Jared Sleeper described it as a "mediocre SaaS" business. The company added automatic metadata enrichment, face recognition, semantic search, canvas, more than 50 generative models and AI agents, but the results fell short of expectations.