Licences describe how many leaders are activated, which is a different question from how many people are covered.
Why it matters when the plan changes
The people whose decisions the product supports are a small subset of the people it holds data about. Pricing those separately keeps the commercial model honest: an organisation can cover a large population while activating a handful of leaders, paying for what it actually uses rather than for scale. Data protection law reflects the same principle, that access should be limited to what is necessary for the purpose it serves, not extended by default to rank.
The tension is that access and usefulness diverge. A licence gives a leader the tools; whether they use them depends on whether a decision is in front of them. Selling licences ahead of decisions produces dormant access, which looks like adoption and produces no value. This matters most across functions: research on strategy execution found only nine per cent of managers say they can rely on colleagues in other units all the time, the exact gap a licensed leader is trying to see.
In practice
A division covers two thousand employees and activates fourteen leader licences, one for each business-unit head making decisions the platform supports. A year later four more are added as a new layer starts using the model. Coverage did not change; the number of leaders making decisions did.
Evidence
Access should follow purpose and need rather than seniority alone, which is what licensing by decision-making role reflects.
Article 5, General Data Protection Regulation (2016)Cross-unit commitments are the least reliable part of execution, which is what leaders using the model are usually trying to see.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It, Harvard Business Review (2015)
What it cannot tell you
A leader licence counts activated access, not use. It cannot tell you whether a decision was in front of that leader, whether the insight changed what they did, or whether the right leader was licensed at all. Absence of use looks identical to absence of need from the count alone.
How Atlas reads it
Leader licences give leaders role and team insight, decision support, follow-up and access to the relevant platform modules, and expand as more leaders are activated or higher-value modules are added. Standard Atlas AI access is included for licensed leaders. Licence counts and prices live in the approved price list and contracts rather than in the model.
Questions
A leader licence gives access to role and team insight for the areas that leader owns, decision support, and follow-up on earlier decisions, plus the relevant platform modules. Article 5 of the GDPR (2016) reflects the same principle: access should be limited to what is necessary for its purpose, not widened by seniority.
Coverage is the population that can be assessed and receive their own results. Licences are the leaders who use the model to make decisions. The two numbers are usually very different, and pricing them separately is what keeps an agreement matched to actual use.
No. Access follows purpose and need rather than seniority, and a leader sees what is relevant to the decisions they own. The full four-role permission model is described in the product direction as being built rather than shipped, and is presented that way.
Licences should be added when another leader has a decision the model can support, not when a staff number or level changes. Adding licences ahead of decisions produces dormant access. Harvard Business Review reported in 2015 that only nine per cent of managers can rely on colleagues in other units all the time, the gap this access should follow.
They are recurring access for the contracted term and are reviewed at renewal along with coverage and capacity. The specific terms, counts and prices are in the approved price list and the signed contract rather than in the commercial model.