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How AI-Era Pricing Is Reshaping Finance Operations
Usage-based and hybrid pricing models are changing how B2B companies generate revenue — and creating new headaches for the finance teams behind them.
Tabs co-founder Rebecca Schwartz and PwC Partner Amit Dhir sat down to unpack exactly what that means in practice: how pricing model decisions ripple into revenue recognition, forecasting, and financial ops — and what it takes to scale without piling on manual work.
Watch the on-demand recording to get practical frameworks, real-world examples, and a clear path to operationalizing usage-based revenue — including a forward-looking take on how AI will reshape financial workflows. If your team is navigating pricing complexity heading into the back half of the year, this is worth an hour.
Beginners in AI
Good morning and thank you for joining us again!
Welcome to this daily edition of Beginners in AI, where we explore the latest trends, tools, and news in the world of AI and the tech that surrounds it. Like all editions, this is human curated and edited, and published with the intention of making AI news and technology more accessible to everyone.
THE FRONT PAGE
AI Is Answering Your Scam Calls Now, and Scammers Are Screaming at It
TLDR: An Australian company runs 200,000 fake AI victims that answer scam calls all day, and in six weeks they wasted 500 days of scammers' time.
The Story:
Apate builds AI characters whose entire job is to pick up scam calls and pretend to fall for them. It has almost 200,000 of them now, up from 120 at launch. Each one has its own voice, accent, and small verbal habits, including the "umm" noises people make while they're thinking. The company trained them on hundreds of hours of recordings of real humans stringing scammers along, so the bots know the counter-moves. In six weeks at the end of 2025, they handled 600,000 scam calls for a single Australian phone company. Founder Dali Kaafar says that ate more than 500 days of scammer time, or roughly $13 million that never got stolen. Apate tracks how many times scammers swear at the bots as a monthly performance number.
Kaafar got the idea in November 2021 when a scammer called him during a family picnic in Sydney. He played dumb for 44 minutes while his kids watched. Last year the UK phone company O2 built a version of this as a public ad campaign: one AI granny who talked about her 28 cats until scammers hung up. Apate took that same trick and ran it two hundred thousand times over, all day, every day. The bots also sit on WhatsApp and Telegram waiting for scammers to come to them. While they talk, they collect crypto wallet addresses by the thousands and pass them to banks before any money moves. In July they turned up a marketplace in India where brokers were selling verified bank accounts for a 5% cut of whatever scam money passed through.
Its Significance:
This is the smartest use of AI for the common good(outside of medical applications)I've seen in months, and the reason is the sheer time and money stolen by scammers. One guy wasted 44 minutes for free as a joke. A phone company turned that joke into a single character for an ad. Then somebody asked the obvious next question: what if you ran it 200,000 times at once, forever, and had it take notes? Scamming is a $1.24 trillion business and Apate figures 20% to 30% of scam texts already have AI on the other end, so this fight was going to happen with or without the good guys showing up. Every hour a con artist spends yelling at a robot is an hour they're not calling your grandma.
QUICK TAKES
The story: In a letter to investors, Stripe wrote that it decided January 1st, 2026 marked the beginning of the singularity and has run the business on that assumption for eight months since. The same letter confirmed it's buying OpenRouter, the service that routes AI prompts to whichever model fits the job, reportedly for $7.5 billion, up from OpenRouter's $1.3 billion valuation in May.
Your takeaway: Drop the sci-fi word and this is a payments company buying a toll booth. OpenRouter sits between developers and nearly every major model, so Stripe now sees which models people pay for and how much they spend doing it. Stripe also said first-half revenue climbed 41% and that staying private is deliberate, which is a polite way of saying don't hold your breath for an IPO.
The story: Eligible US college students get 12 months of Google AI Pro at no cost, a $19.99 a month plan that includes 4x higher Gemini limits, Gemini Spark, Gemini inside Gmail and Docs, and 5TB of storage. Students in more than 140 other countries get a free year of Google AI Plus instead, with Gemini Omni, double the usage limits, and 400GB of storage.
Your takeaway: There's also a rebuilt student section in the Gemini app with study notebooks, flashcards, and practice quizzes that get built from lecture slides and notes you upload. If you're in school, or you're paying tuition for someone who is, that's $240 you can stop spending. Google isn't being generous. Whichever assistant a 19 year old picks in August is the one they'll still be using at 25.
The story: Amazon switched on Alexa+ for all US customers with a compatible Fire TV, no Prime membership and no subscription required. Nothing to download, nothing to activate. The upgrade brings conversational search, so you can ask for a top-rated thriller and then follow up with "something newer" or "with a female lead," plus smart home controls like putting a Ring camera feed on the TV or dimming the lights for movie night.
Your takeaway: Amazon says people talk to Alexa+ on Fire TV about twice as much as they did with the old Alexa, and they pick its top recommendation 40% more often. Free is the first move, not the whole plan. Every mood you describe out loud and every follow-up you ask tells Amazon more about your taste than ten years of remote clicks ever did, and that data is what you're paying with right now. Ads come next, then the upsell, and Amazon already built that piece: the free version leaves out Routines, advanced Home Modes, and some Ring camera features, all of which sit behind Prime or the paid Alexa+ plan. Streaming ran this same order, and so did most social apps. Is it really free if you're already paying with your data?
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
📝 Standard Notes Free and Open Source: A highly secure digital notepad that fully encrypts your personal journals and daily thoughts so absolutely nobody else can read them.
🚑 Rescuezilla Free and Open Source: A user friendly graphical utility that lets you easily backup and restore your entire computer hard drive just like an emergency digital life raft.
🌐 Ghost Free and Open Source: A gorgeous publishing platform that empowers writers and creators to easily launch their own personal blogs and newsletters without relying on restrictive corporate publishing networks.
💾 Duplicati Freemium: A reliable automatic backup system that securely encrypts your personal files and safely stores them on your preferred cloud storage provider without requiring complicated setup menus.
TRENDING
AI rebuilds a ruined face in about 30 seconds — Researchers at IIT Gandhinagar and IIT BHU built a system called GenR that repairs blurry, torn, or faded faces without ever being shown examples of that specific kind of damage. It works by guessing clean versions and refining them until the guess matches whatever detail survived in the original. Great for the shoebox of family photos in your closet, less great for anyone who has ever relied on a blur to stay anonymous.
OpenAI puts zero data retention behind its frontier models — Eligible API customers get a promise that OpenAI keeps no copy of their prompts or the model's replies once a request finishes, and staff can't read the content. OpenAI is also previewing something called Private Safety Processing, meant to catch risky patterns across a whole string of requests without any human at the company seeing what's in them. Details on who counts as "eligible" are still thin, and a technical paper is promised for September.
Meta AI gets a real Mac app — It's a 16MB native download, not a browser in a costume, and it does dictation that works in any app plus screen sharing so the assistant can look at what you're stuck on. Business owners can hook it to their Instagram, Facebook, ad campaigns, and Google Workspace and just ask what's working. Worth reading Meta's privacy terms before you connect your email to it.
ChatGPT ads hit 31 European countries — Starting August 24, free and Go plan users in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland and 26 other markets will start seeing ads in chats, bringing the total to 35 countries six months after the US pilot began. Paid Plus, Pro, and Enterprise stay clean. My bet: they're stacking up every growth number they can ahead of an IPO, and an ad business that went from zero to 35 countries in six months looks a lot better in a filing than a subscription line alone.
MIT: nobody can say whose art an AI image came from — CSAIL researchers trained 24 sets of models on datasets from 256 images up to 160,000 and found that past a certain size, you can pull out any single image, or every image by one artist, or every photo of one person, and the output barely budges. They call it attribution decay, and the effect gets stronger as datasets grow. That's a problem for every lawsuit and licensing deal built on tracing a picture back to a source.
A robot learns a therapist's touch, not just their moves — MIT engineers built a two-armed robot that uses the same family of AI behind image generators, except it learned how hard to push and pull rather than what to draw. It gives a stroke patient just enough help to keep the exercise hard but doable. Therapists in Munich are now wearing force-sensing gloves during real sessions so the system can learn each one's individual style.
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TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
🍽️ Say what you're craving and where. Get one real dish at one real restaurant worth going to, not a list to scroll through.
Build a single-file HTML app with vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. The Live Restaurant Dish Finder — describe a craving and a city, get one real dish at one real restaurant, grounded in live web search.
Aesthetic: warm near-black (#150e0c), appetizing red-orange (#e05a3a) primary with a warm glow top-left, gold (#d4a24c) secondary for the practical-note card with a glow bottom-right. Libre Baskerville serif for the dish name/headings, Inter for body, JetBrains Mono for labels.
Form: craving text input, city text input, vibe/budget dropdown (casual / mid-range / special occasion).
Technical: call the Anthropic Messages API WITH tools:[{type:'web_search_20250305', name:'web_search'}] (works automatically), system prompt as someone who finds ONE real, specific restaurant and ideally its actual signature dish matching the craving/city/vibe, grounded in search, never inventing a restaurant or dish without real evidence — if no confident match is found, say so honestly (found:false) rather than fabricating one. Return raw JSON: found (boolean), restaurant_name, neighborhood, dish_name, why_this (2-3 specific sentences), practical_note (optional, e.g. reservations/cash-only/waits), backup (a real alternate: restaurant_name, dish_name, why).
Render: a gradient "go here, order this" hero card with the dish name, restaurant, neighborhood, the why-this reasoning, and a "Open in Google Maps" link built client-side from a maps search URL (no API key needed, just encodeURIComponent(restaurant + city)). An optional gold "worth knowing" practical-note card. A backup pick card below. On a found:false response, surface a clear error asking the person to adjust their craving or city rather than showing a fake result.What this does: Describe the craving, the city, and the vibe you're after, and it searches the live web to find one real, specific restaurant with a standout dish that matches, not an invented placeholder. You get the dish, the restaurant, its neighborhood, a specific reason it fits what you asked for, any practical note search turned up (reservations, cash only, long waits), and a one-tap link straight to it on Google Maps. A real backup pick sits underneath in case the first spot's closed or full.
What this looks like:
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Hold a 40 minute phone call convincing enough that a working scammer keeps pitching, including hesitation sounds and regional accents.
❌ Still Can't: Tell you which training pictures shaped an image it just made. MIT found that past a certain dataset size, removing any single one changes nothing.
✅ AI Can Now: Learn how much physical force to apply to a patient's arm by feeling how a therapist does it.
❌ Still Can't: Work without a specific therapist first. The model copies one person's touch and needs fresh recordings for each new one.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Silent Running (1972) - Movie
Douglas Trumbull, the effects genius behind 2001, directed this on a decommissioned aircraft carrier, about a botanist (Bruce Dern) aboard a freighter carrying the last of Earth's forests in enormous geodesic domes, working alongside three small maintenance drones he eventually renames Huey, Dewey, and Louie. The drones were played by amputee actors walking on their hands and have no faces, no voices, and no dialogue, yet they are among the most affecting robot characters in film. R2-D2 owes them a considerable debt.
Thank you for reading. We’re all beginners in something. With that in mind, your questions and feedback are always welcome and I read every single email!
-James
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