🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses how the prevailing prepaid pricing models of generative AI platforms raise barriers to entry, stifle innovation, and marginalize developers from emerging economies. To counter this, the paper proposes a “Revenue Share as Infrastructure” (RSI) model, wherein platforms offer AI services at no upfront cost and instead take a share of developers’ application revenues. This approach reconfigures incentive structures and value co-creation dynamics across multi-sided markets by inverting the traditional upstream fee paradigm. By substantially lowering access barriers and better aligning platform and developer interests, RSI fosters greater participation—particularly from low-income countries—and enables the deployment of localized AI applications in high-impact domains such as health and agriculture, especially in regions with high mobile penetration. The model thus unlocks significant potential for inclusive digital innovation and employment generation.
📝 Abstract
Generative AI platforms (Google AI Studio, OpenAI, Anthropic) provide infrastructures (APIs, models) that are transforming the application development ecosystem. Recent literature distinguishes three generations of business models: a first generation modeled on cloud computing (pay-per-use), a second characterized by diversification (freemium, subscriptions), and a third, emerging generation exploring multi-layer market architectures with revenue-sharing mechanisms. Despite these advances, current models impose a financial barrier to entry for developers, limiting innovation and excluding actors from emerging economies. This paper proposes and analyzes an original model, "Revenue-Sharing as Infrastructure" (RSI), where the platform offers its AI infrastructure for free and takes a percentage of the revenues generated by developers applications. This model reverses the traditional upstream payment logic and mobilizes concepts of value co-creation, incentive mechanisms, and multi-layer market architecture to build an original theoretical framework. A detailed comparative analysis shows that the RSI model lowers entry barriers for developers, aligns stakeholder interests, and could stimulate innovation in the ecosystem. Beyond its economic relevance, RSI has a major societal dimension: by enabling developers without initial capital to participate in the digital economy, it could unlock the "latent jobs dividend" in low-income countries, where mobile penetration reaches 84%, and help address local challenges in health, agriculture, and services. Finally, we discuss the conditions of feasibility and strategic implications for platforms and developers.