What Features Lead Consumers to Upgrade to Paid AI Plans?
Executive Summary
Our latest conjoint study reveals that while message limits are the primary barrier to conversion, 'low-cost' adjustments like ad personalization, ethical positioning, and removing autonomous agents, offer surprising competitive advantages.Key Findings
- Adding unlimited messages is the most powerful way to get consumers to upgrade from free to paid AI plans. Adding output types and memory are nearly as powerful.
- Less costly feature upgrades that convert consumers are personalized ads, ethical AI, and removing automation.
Implications for Business Leaders
- Consider raising message limits, memory, and including more output types, but compare to the cost of such additions.
- Take advantage of low-hanging fruit: personalized ads, ethical AI, and removing automation.
Despite massive spending by AI companies in recent years, consumers have been reluctant to pay for AI tools. How can AI companies adapt their plans to meet consumers’ needs and convert free customers to paid customers?
Empirical Intelligence and ND Research recently ran a choice-based conjoint survey with 314 US respondents. Based on the results, we created a market simulator with both free and paid plans with identical baseline features. We then boosted the features in the paid plan one at a time to see which ones moved consumers from the free to the paid plan.
Here are the baseline features: no memory, 50 message/day limit, text-only output, autonomous actions, ads that are not personalized, and AI company that works with the military.
The table below shows each upgrade, how much it converts consumers to a paid plan, and how much it costs the AI company.
| Feature Upgrade | Lift (Percentage Points) | Cost to Company |
|---|---|---|
| Unlimited messages | 5.4 | High |
| Text, image, and video output | 3.8 | High |
| 60 days of memory | 3.3 | High |
| 30 days of memory | 3.0 | High |
| Personalized ads | 1.9 | Low |
| AI company does not work with the military | 1.6 | Low |
| 250 message limit | 1.6 | High |
| Text and image output | 1.6 | High |
| No autonomous actions | 0.3 | Reduction |
| No ads | 0.3 | High |
The Power of Unlimited AI
The feature that makes the biggest difference is removing usage limits. Moving from a 50 messages a day limit to unlimited messages would increase the percentage of paying customers by 5.4 percentage points. A smaller upgrade to 250 messages a day would increase the percentage of paying customers by 1.6 percentage points.
Consumers Prefer More Output Types
The second strongest feature upgrade is adding output types. Adding image and video output to a text-only plan raises the share of paying customers by 3.8 percentage points. Adding images to a text-only plan raises the share of paying customers by 1.6 percentage points.
Consumers Prefer More Memory
The third strongest upgrade is adding memory. Adding 60 days of memory to a plan with no memory raises the share of paying customers by 3.3 percentage points. A smaller boost of 30 days raises it by 3.0 percentage points.
These three upgrade types likely raise the costs to AI companies. There are also changes AI companies can make to their plans that would not necessarily cost them extra.
Ad personalization Matters
One low-cost upgrade is making ads relevant to consumers. Consumers really don’t like plans with ads that are not personalized. The share of paid users would increase by 1.9 percentage points if ads were changed from not personalized to personalized.
Interestingly, removing ads entirely yields only a 0.3-point gain in paid users. Consumers don't mind ads in AI tools. They just want them to be relevant. For companies, this means ad personalization is a high-ROI alternative to the revenue loss of removing ads.
Ethical Edge
A second upgrade that would not necessarily cost AI companies more is not working with the military. Most of the major AI companies in the United States work with the Department of Defense. If they stopped working with the military, an AI company could gain 1.6 percentage points in the share of consumers using a paid plan.
The 'Agent' Paradox: High Cost, Low Demand
A final upgrade that would reduce costs for AI companies is removing agent mode. Autonomous AI is one of the features that cost AI companies the most and consumers don’t like it. Removing autonomous actions, and thus reducing costs, would raise the percentage of paid customers by 0.3 percentage points.
Research on consumers’ preferences like this can help AI companies identify the plan features that make consumers want to spend money on AI plans. Read more here about using conjoint analysis to optimize products.