CEOInterviews.AI
Start App
Try: AI strategy tariffs earnings guidance layoffs interest rates growth

Alan Trefler

Cofounder, Pegasystems

Search every verified Alan Trefler interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Alan Trefler, founder and CEO of Pegasystems, discussed the company's approach to AI pricing and strategy in a September 2026 podcast appearance. He stated that Pegasystems does not charge customers for AI tokens, comparing the practice to a restaurant menu where customers order prepared dishes rather than paying for test-kitchen ingredients. Trefler criticized token-based pricing models, describing them as opaque and likening some AI companies' promotional strategies to "drug dealers" distributing free samples to build dependency. He also expressed skepticism about industry projections involving thousands of independent AI agents, calling such scenarios "madness" and noting that many customers share his doubts. During Pegasystems' Q2 2026 earnings call in July 2026, Trefler reiterated the company's AI monetization strategy, which he said is based on business value clients create on the platform rather than usage-based token fees. He emphasized that clients should be rewarded for outcomes, not penalized for AI usage. Trefler also commented on the proliferation of open-source and open-weight AI models, calling it "great and inevitable," while predicting that model makers would increasingly find their offerings commoditized. He highlighted Pegasystems' architectural choices around design-time and run-time capabilities as differentiators and expressed optimism about the company's technology investments, including Blueprint and Infinity Studio, despite acknowledging that some benefits might take several quarters to materialize.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“When we saw what OpenAI was doing and they were kind of giving it away and then you got Anthropic and maybe it's $20 a month which doesn't remotely cover anything meaningful, it struck me that these guys are a little bit like drug dealers. They were out there passing out packets of tokens and getting people hooked on the very cool stuff. And inevitably when you have an abundance of supply and no consideration of cost”

“We announced at PegaWorld in June that our uses of AI for our customers, the customers don't pay for tokens because let me give you the analogy. Let's say you wanted to open a restaurant. You might go and hire a great chef. They might you might create a test kitchen. You might go into that test kitchen and you might create the collection of recipes and then decide which you want to put on your menu. When a customer c”

“Because this is so structured and specialized in the way that it uses AI. We don't have to charge for tokens. So using Pega AI will not accrue a token charge. And I think that that is just marvelous because it allows you to focus on results. On getting things done.”

“Contrast this to the way that the agentic folks talk about reasoning and wanting to re-reason every single time you do something. We think this is madness. We think that workflow recipe mindset is an architectural mindset for your businesses and may not be 100% of what you do. But let's face it, a tremendous amount of every business has similarity. And you should look there before you go build burn tens of thousands ”

“4 weeks ago, this amazing thing happened. Now, we knew this was going to happen several years ago because we've seen this movie. But a lot of people seemed stunned when suddenly the dealers began wanting you to pay for the tokens. So, all of these $20 a month plans or $100 a month plans suddenly became oh my god no maybe it'll be as many as it'll be.”

“We discovered that these new models that people have, they actually don't always come up with the same answers. I mean, look, we like them because they were creative and probabilistic and that can be extremely powerful. But they seem to almost form opinions of their own sometimes, do sometimes unusual things leading to unusual headlines.”

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →