Head of Commercial — Agent Economy & API
Why This Role Exists
The first commercial owner of the agent economy — the person who decides how Product.ai gets paid when a machine, not a human, does the shopping. I'm Michael, founder and CEO of Product.ai. This role exists to turn "agents should pay us" into signed pilots, priced access, and partners who ship us inside their product.
The System
Cortex, the shared AI brain that runs this company and IS the product family we sell. Every operator, me included, works through governed AI sessions, and the substrate answers its own questions from a base of 8,600+ internal documents.
A two-sided market that pays for certainty. Shoppers and the AI agents shopping for them consume verified codes — proof a discount is real before checkout. Merchants pay to protect their own brand: we send a free alert when a brand is being served dead codes, and that alert converts into a paid find-and-fix loop.
The agent-commerce shift. The buyer is turning from a human into a machine. AI agents are starting to choose their data sources the way Google once chose which pages to rank. Being the verified-commerce source an agent reaches for is the whole game, and the window to be chosen is open now, not later.
The keyed-API lane and its two real deadlines. We're closing the open door and opening a paid one. Anonymous access to our API ends August 15. The free legacy codes expire September 30. Keyed developer access sells at $49 to $199 a month. Those dates are public and already on our developer docs — you inherit a countdown, not a blank page.
The affiliate-network engine. A real revenue engine already runs underneath this. Affiliate networks route roughly $22M a year in commission to us, and the top four carry about two-thirds of it. This is a relationship surface — network reps, two conferences a year, the escalation call when something breaks — not a spreadsheet you optimize from a desk.
A second line forming: Axioms.ai. Verified research, sold as a product, under the working name Axioms.ai. It is early and mostly concept today. The buyer relationships that will carry it start with the ones you build now.
What You Will Own
The agent-economy revenue line, end to end. Today it has no owner. You're the first. You own whether Product.ai gets paid when a machine uses it.
API and MCP monetization. MCP is the protocol AI assistants use to call outside tools like ours. You own the packaging, the pricing tiers at $49 to $199 a month, and the migration off free access before the August 15 and September 30 deadlines land.
The merchant revenue program. The free "your brand is being served dead codes" alert, and the paid find-and-fix loop it converts into. You own the whole funnel, from free signal to paid contract.
Platform partnerships. Getting Product.ai listed as a named capability inside the AI ecosystems people already use — ChatGPT apps, Apple App Intents, Gemini, and Claude. Being chosen there is the new being indexed by Google, and you'll write that playbook while you run it.
The affiliate-network relationships. The ~$22M/yr commission business runs through partners who need a human they trust. You are that human — the network reps, the two conferences a year, the escalation call.
A co-signed seat charter. Within your first quarter, you and I co-sign a charter for this seat: one machine-checkable number that proves the seat works, and a written split of what you decide freely versus what you bring to me first. This is the model we run here — a seat is a promise you can measure, not a title.
A first-quarter number that points at signed pilots and letters of intent, not API revenue. The billing spine ships in parallel with your first deals, so we measure you on demand you prove real, not on infrastructure you're waiting on.
Who You Are
You think in systems and money at the same time. You can hold the two-sided market, the agent shift, and a pricing table in your head at once, and you reason from first principles when the map runs out — which here it will, often.
You close. You've carried a deal from a cold relationship to a signed contract yourself, and you like the part where it's hard.
You treat AI as a force multiplier, not a novelty: you'll run agents against your own pipeline, your drafts, and your research, and you'll check what they hand back rather than trust it on faith.
You can move between a partner dinner and a pricing model in the same week without dropping either thread.
You've taken a technical product from zero to its first paying customers, and you can point to the deals.
Who this isn't for
This is the wrong seat if you need a quota, an accelerator, and a comp plan that pays you to work a defined territory — this is an ownership seat, not a commission chase, and the number you own is yours to define and defend.
This is wrong if the draw is a big-logo title on your profile, because the work is unglamorous first-revenue building and the market will not be impressed by your last employer.
This is wrong if you only do one slice — just partnerships, or just closing — because you'll own pricing, developer packaging, merchant conversion, and network relationships all at once.
This is wrong if your instinct is to manage upward and narrate progress: here the signed pilot is the story, and there is nowhere for activity to hide.
How We Evaluate
I don't run traditional interviews. I run a process that respects your time and shows you ours. Every stage is demonstrated performance on real, work-relevant tasks.
An async video screen. Five or six questions, about fifteen minutes, on your own time. I want to see how you reason, not how you present.
Calls with company stakeholders. Short conversations with the operators closest to this seat.
A conversation with me. How you model the business, where you push back, and whether you can hold a revenue argument live.
A paid work trial. Real work, on our real problems, for about two weeks, paid at a rate that respects your time. You might build the pricing model for keyed access, open a real partner conversation, or take the merchant program from idea to a first outreach.
Compensation & Ownership
Total first-year compensation runs $400,000 to $500,000 — base, plus ownership, plus profit share.
The base is $220,000 to $275,000, top of market for a commercial leader. There is no commission plan and no OTE ladder, and that's deliberate. Instead you get Profits Interest Units — real ownership in the company from day one, at a $0 strike, with capital-gains treatment. You share in the profit the company actually generates, paid pro-rata from free cash flow every year, and you can sell into an annual tender for real liquidity — cash, not paper you wait a decade to touch.
We cover 100% of your family's premiums.
Location
Based in Santa Monica, Los Angeles — in person, five days a week. The rooms are real rooms.