This is The Agentic Commercial Model, a newsletter about the operating model crisis hiding inside the AI gold rush. Who it's for, what it covers, and why most of what you've been told about AI monetization is wrong.
Let me start with an admission. I've spent 20 years building commercial engines inside software and telco businesses, at Virgin Media O2, Cloudinary, Emarsys, and now across a portfolio of 20+ SaaS businesses at The Access Group, one of the UK's largest PE-backed software groups. I've watched more commercial transformations succeed and fail than I can count. And right now, I'm watching the industry make a category-level mistake, one that will take three to five years to fully surface, and will destroy a lot of value in the process. The mistake isn't moving too fast on AI. It's moving fast on AI product while leaving the commercial operating model completely untouched.
The boardrooms are focused on the wrong problem
Every board conversation I'm in right now is a version of the same thing: AI features, AI roadmap, AI competitive positioning. Fair enough if you're not shipping AI, you're falling behind. But there's a parallel conversation that isn't happening, and its absence is going to be expensive. How do you price an AI agent that replaces three FTEs? How do you compensate a sales rep when the product sells, deploys, and expands autonomously? How do you measure retention when your customer is an algorithm, not a person? How do you define NRR when the unit of consumption is a task completed rather than a seat occupied? These are not product questions. They're commercial operating model questions. And the answer to all of them right now, across most of the industry, is: we haven't changed anything yet. Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, the giants are repricing at the margins. Adding consumption tiers. Bundling AI features into enterprise packages. Calling it transformation. It isn't. It's the same operating model with a new SKU on top.
"The companies that survive the agentic era won't be the ones that shipped AI fastest. They'll be the ones that rebuilt how they sell, measure, and retain commercial value around what AI actually delivers."
What this newsletter is and who it's for
The Agentic Commercial Model is a weekly newsletter about the operating model crisis hiding inside the AI gold rush. It's not about AI technology. There's no shortage of newsletters explaining what large language models do or which foundation model will win. This newsletter operates one layer above that at the level of commercial architecture. How do you build a business model, a go-to-market structure, and an incentive system that actually works when your product is agentic? It's for three audiences specifically: PE operating partners and portfolio teams working through commercial transformation at software businesses where the pressure to show value creation from AI is real, but the playbook doesn't exist yet. Chief Commercial Officers and VP Commercials at SaaS businesses particularly those managing the transition from pure seat-based to hybrid or consumption-based models, and discovering that the GTM, comp, and retention problems are harder than the pricing problem. SaaS founders and CEOs who have shipped an AI product and are now staring at a commercial motion that wasn't designed for what they've built.
What I'll cover and what I won't
The Agentic Commercial Model series:
01 — This issue: who this is for and why it matters now
02 — The Consumption Problem: why usage-based pricing alone doesn't solve agentic AI monetization
03 — The Broken Comp Plan: how legacy incentive structures are destroying AI-era commercial performance
04 — NRR Is Lying to You: why your retention metric is masking structural decay
05 — The GTM Collapse: when your buyer is an algorithm, your sales motion is obsolete
06 — Value that can't be measured won't be paid for: outcome-based pricing in practice
Every issue will take one specific dimension of the commercial operating model problem and give you a concrete position on it. Not a framework with boxes. Not a "it depends." A position one I'm prepared to defend and one that will likely make someone uncomfortable. The series I'm working through:
Why I'm writing this
I run commercial transformation across a portfolio of over 20 software businesses. The challenge I see every week isn't a technology problem. It's a commercial architecture problem. Businesses that have built genuinely good AI products are failing to monetize them. Businesses that are monetizing them are doing it in ways that will create retention cliffs in 18 months. And businesses that are watching from the sidelines are going to find the gap has become uncrossable. Nobody is talking about this at the level of specificity it deserves. Most content on AI monetization is either too abstract "align pricing with value" or too narrow "here's a token pricing calculator." The commercial operating model sits between those two levels. That's where the real work is. And that's what this newsletter covers. I'm also building FR Advisory around exactly this problem working directly with PE-backed SaaS businesses on commercial model transformation for the agentic era. So if what I write resonates, there's a practical dimension to it: this isn't theory from a distance. It's what I'm doing in boardrooms right now.
"Most content on AI monetization is either too abstract or too narrow. The commercial operating model sits between those two levels. That's where the real work is."
One thing you should know about how I write: I name names. If Salesforce's Einstein pricing strategy is structurally flawed, I'll say so and explain why. If the standard PE playbook for SaaS commercial transformation hasn't been updated for the agentic era, I'll say that too. The point isn't provocation for its own sake. The point is that polite, hedged takes on structural problems are useless to the people actually trying to solve them. If that's not what you're looking for, this probably isn't the newsletter for you. No hard feelings. If it is subscribe, and I'll see you next week with The Consumption Problem.
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The Agentic Commercial Model publishes weekly. Written by Fessal Rahman, Group Director at The Access Group
First published in the Agentic Commercial Model newsletter on LinkedIn, June 9, 2026. Read the original on LinkedIn.