01 of 9 · The Agentic Commercial Model
Whether the commercial structure embodies the new operating model, rather than describing how work used to be done.
Organisation design is the layer that decides whether every other layer has a home. It covers where commercial authority sits once selling and serving stop being separate motions, who owns the customer relationship across its full lifecycle rather than handing it between departments at the moment of signature, and where the capacity freed up by agentic tooling actually gets redeployed.
Most companies treat this layer as an afterthought, addressed only after pricing and product decisions have already been made. That ordering is backwards. A pricing model built around outcomes and consumption cannot survive inside an org chart still built around seat based sales and a separate customer success function that only shows up after the deal closes.
A widely cited study of large companies found that firms cutting headcount hardest to fund AI report financial returns almost identical to those cutting the least: in some cases the lighter cutters do better. That data point is the clearest evidence that headcount reduction, on its own, is not a redesign. It is cost cutting wearing the language of transformation, and it leaves the structural question unanswered: who actually owns the commercial motion when the wall between selling and serving stops making sense.
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