Jason M. Lemkin talks to a user whose Clay AI agent quoted a five-fold price increase for a simple task, defaulting to the most expensive option. The agent wasn't trained on Clay's new pricing tiers, and the user nearly quit before proceeding. Transparent pricing and proper agent training matter when costs are on the line.
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Its agent lied to us. Its agent lied to us. So what? So there's a meta story.
I was mad and frustrated at a point where I literally told the Clay team, like, this is the first time I've wanted to rage quit an agent, which has never happened with all the 20 plus. I mean, I've tried more than 20. Like, this is the first time I've legitimately wanted to rage quit because the answer that the AI agent gave me was so unacceptable, was so bad. I was building a new list of, you know, VIPs to go out to for the summit. And suddenly Clay wanted to charge me about 5x to run this list than it did the week previous.
Clay wanted to, or its agent told you you had to pay 5x?
Its agent told me it was going to be 5 times the amount of credit. Told me I was going to have to pay 5 times as much. And so when I pushed the Sculptor agent, I said, how can that be? I just did this on a very similar size list, a very similar arrangement, basically almost the same parameters. And it was, I don't know, let's say something like 2,500 credits, but now it's trying to charge me 11,000, which is a huge, a huge— I was like, it has to be wrong, right? At first I caught that the agent related to their price increase changed how it, how it billed, but it also defaulted to the most expensive action versus a cheaper action that would get me to the same outcome. It's like, okay, we're, we're halfway there. And that part of the issue I thought was problematic because most people won't do that. Most people are going to look at the $11,000 that the agent tells you and say, that's too expensive. And they would give up right there.
So the upsell, the agent, the agent told you how to use the most expensive version of the product that you didn't have to use.
There's, there's a better way to do this.
And that was intentional. Or you think that was poorly training the agent?
Don't know if somebody as a human at Klai unintentionally like that was the consequence of them putting in this release for new pricing, that the agent took it and ran with it. Right. I was talking to the agent and the agent was like, well, let's use this super expensive, luxurious model versus like the normal, you know, Prius model you were using.
Yeah, because I have a rough— I know. And listen, we do use Clay and it's a great product. When a company introduces more complicated pricing, even if they say it's a better deal, it's always a hidden price increase. But by adding complexity to pricing, you can essentially make segments of your users pay more.
I'm just going to— even though this is more expensive than it was a week ago, I'm just going to push it through because I need to get this done. I was like, I just can't keep— you know, I had already been arguing with the agent for like half an hour at like 11:00 on a Sunday. It shouldn't be on the customer to figure out, tired or not. It shouldn't be on me to figure out that the new plan was going to be worse for this outcome. And I should have just stayed on my legacy plan at the time and just bought more credits, which In hindsight, yes, of course I would have done.
But I thought the second issue when, when you reached out to the Clay team was that, and I think this is something we all need to learn about agents, was they had actually not properly trained their beta agent on how their new pricing worked.
