Is a Bot a User? A 2017 Court Case Already Answered That.

Everyone is working out what an AI agent will save you. Almost nobody has worked out what it adds to your software bill — not the agent, but the software it logs into. An agent doesn't replace the systems your plant runs on. It signs into them, the same way a person does. To answer one question about a slow line, it might open your production system, then your quality records, then the scheduler. Three logins, one question. And you pay for every login. So do those three count? Nobody is sure yet — and how many are we actually talking about? Palo Alto Networks asked three thousand security leaders how many non-human accounts they run — scripts, service accounts, automated connections. For every one human being, they counted a hundred and nine. So is this a new problem? Not really. A court settled it nine years ago. In twenty-seventeen the software giant SAP took one of its own customers to court in London: the drinks maker Diageo. Diageo had built its own app for its sales team, and behind the scenes that app pulled data out of SAP. Diageo's argument was simple — our salespeople never opened SAP, so they are not SAP users. The court disagreed. Reach the software and you are using it, whichever door you come through. SAP had sued for fifty-five million pounds. That was decided long before anyone said the word agent — what's changed is the volume. So what does that do to your bill? Gartner expects the software that runs factories to cost forty percent more by twenty-twenty-nine — partly because vendors are starting to charge for accounts that aren't people. It might go the other way, mind — fewer humans, fewer seats. Your factory worked this out decades ago. Everything automated that can touch a batch already has an identity, and gets counted. Your contract was written as though only people log in. So what do your own contracts call a user? Here's this week's tip, and it takes ten minutes. Pick any software your team runs and open its terms and conditions page. Paste it into any AI assistant and ask one thing: find every definition of "user", and say whether a service account or an AI agent counts as one. I did this on Atlassian's. Their contract says a user is any individual that Customer authorizes to use the Products. An individual. It says nothing about machines at all — it doesn't allow them, and doesn't rule them out. Public document, ten minutes, none of your own data. The question isn't new. Only the scale is. Go and count yours — I'll see you next week.