[Un]Churned · 7 Oct 2026 · From the week of 5 October
"We Will Die": Why QuotaPath Is Betting Everything on AI-Native Services ft. AJ Bruno (QuotaPath)
Listen on Apple Podcasts Show on Spotify Episode page
In brief
Josh Schachter, SVP of Strategy and Go-to-Market Development at Gainsight, interviews AJ Bruno, co-founder and CEO of QuotaPath, a nearly nine-year-old commissions and compensation company with just over 1,000 customers and 50,000+ reps. AJ explains why product-led growth failed for a sensitive category like comp, why many companies keep comp plans deliberately opaque, and how QuotaPath is shifting from seat-based SaaS to an AI-native service that runs commissions for customers. He describes a crawl-walk-run move toward outcome-based pricing tied to metrics like GRR and cost of sale, built on controlled tests with design partners, while Josh describes Gainsight running end-to-end renewals in a similar model. Both argue that trust is the main barrier to selling outcomes. AJ's core claim is that the shift is existential: without it, QuotaPath becomes another forgotten SaaS tool.
For founders
- AJ Bruno sees the move from seat-based SaaS to AI-native services as existential, arguing that SaaS tools that don't make it will be forgotten and are not even getting 1x multiples today.
- QuotaPath found its services opportunity by testing it with a tiger team and a few design partners early in the year, discovering that deal sizes expanded and much of the commissions work was repeatable, then launching officially October 1.
- AJ is approaching outcome-based pricing in stages: first prove cost savings on a flat platform fee, then use that customer data to propose and test incentive changes aimed at outcomes the next year.
- Product-led growth failed for QuotaPath because commission data is sensitive and the rep, the CRO and RevOps/finance were too disconnected for bottom-up adoption to travel upward.
- Building a services business inside a mature company feels like a new startup (product-market fit and ICP all over again), and AJ's biggest worry is still hitting plan for the board while doing it.
For revenue leaders
- AJ Bruno argues that variable comp is pointless unless it is tied to a company objective and reps can see that link; QuotaPath is testing whether redesigned incentives can move a metric like GRR from 70% to 80%.
- Many companies deliberately keep comp plans opaque, often because of grandfathered plans, messy CRM data or PE roll-ups with multiple Salesforce instances, and RevOps ends up back in spreadsheets.
- Proving that a comp change caused a revenue outcome, AJ says, requires isolating a few variables against a control group, because pipeline, playbooks and quality all move revenue too.
- Comp analysis can surface costly anomalies, such as BDRs paid at twice the benchmark or a new-business cost of sale equal to 30% of deal size, and the hard question is how to fix them without upsetting the sales team.
- Gainsight is running end-to-end renewals for long-tail and unassigned accounts with AI plus humans in the loop, and selling on the renewal outcome rather than on activities performed.
What was said 18, most useful first
Product-led growth failed for commissions software because the data is sensitive and reps, CROs and RevOps are too disconnected for bottom-up adoption to travel upward.
QuotaPath started as a PLG company expecting reps to adopt it as a personal 'shadow accounting' calculator, share it with their team, and build conviction up to managers and finance. AJ Bruno says those levels turned out to be disconnected: the CRO just wants reps paid correctly and sees it as a distraction, while RevOps handles the plumbing and thinks about cost. He describes a translation problem across all three, and says PLG also kept QuotaPath down market with smaller customers whose use cases it wasn't yet fully handling.
“Well, it turns out those two are actually pretty disconnected. You have the CRO who's like, I just want my team to get paid correctly. It's a distraction.”
QuotaPath's service runs customers' commissions end to end and adds unexpected value by flagging comp anomalies against benchmarks.
AJ Bruno says QuotaPath sits as connective tissue between CRM and HRIS, enriched by ERP data, and literally runs a customer's comp and delivers what the payout should be at quarter end. He argues services win on the extra value the customer didn't expect, such as flagging that BDRs are paid at twice the benchmark or that new-business cost of sale is 30% of total deal size. The hard follow-on question is how to fix such issues without upsetting the sales team.
“Your new business cost of sale contribution is 30 % of the total deal size. That's insane. How do you fix that without pissing off the sales team? That's a big question.”
Buyers value a commissions tool at $10-30 but would pay far more for proof of higher revenue growth, and they won't believe that promise without evidence.
AJ Bruno contrasts asking what someone would pay for a commission tracking tool, which he puts at '$10, $20, $30, whatever', with asking what they'd pay to increase revenue growth from 20% to 30% next year. Buyers are interested in the second but say they don't believe it, so the vendor has to prove it. Josh Schachter added that decreasing cost from miscalculated comp is another outcome to sell.
“If I said, how much would you pay if we literally increased the amount of revenue you were going to grow by from 20 % to 30 % next year? You're like, well, I'd actually be really interested in that, but I don't believe you, so you got to go prove that.”
Proving that a comp change caused an outcome requires isolating a few variables against a control group with design partners.
When Josh Schachter asked how to show causality given that playbooks, outbound, inbound and quality all affect revenue, AJ Bruno said you must come in with a hypothesis and pick three things to measure against a control group, without going out of bounds from those three. He said QuotaPath does this with design partners and that it is mandatory, because otherwise too many metrics, people and processes change at once.
“You have to. Like you absolutely have to because otherwise there's just too many metrics and too many numbers out there and too many people process all of the things that are going to potentially change that.”
AJ Bruno predicts that seat-based SaaS tools that don't move to AI-native services will be forgotten, and that each category will have only one winner.
AJ Bruno says QuotaPath has no choice: without this move it becomes a forgotten SaaS tool, and SaaS tools are not even getting 1x multiples right now. He wants QuotaPath to become the premier AI-native services company, creating a category the way Gainsight once did. He sees Gainsight and QuotaPath as non-competitive allies in getting buyers to accept the new model, and says the old SaaS mentality must change for companies to survive.
“if we do not make this move, we will be a forgotten SaaS. Tool like everyone else and no one no one cares and you're not even getting 1x multiples on SaaS tools right now”
Many companies deliberately keep comp plans ambiguous and hidden from reps because the plans are so confusing.
QuotaPath originally aimed to gamify comp and make it visible to reps, but found many companies purposely obscure it. AJ Bruno says older companies often have reps of 20+ years on 'Frankenstein grandfathered plans' nobody understands. The root problem is often data hygiene: messy CRMs, PE roll-ups combining five different Salesforce instances, and reps who don't enter data, so RevOps ends up using a spreadsheet anyway.
“What we actually found is that a lot of companies actually purposely make it ambiguous and make it hidden, obfuscated from the reps. View because they know it's so confusing.”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Sales team, hiring & comp Link to this
Building comp plans as modular components gave QuotaPath visibility as a differentiator but forces it to keep building to every quirky plan type in the market.
AJ Bruno says QuotaPath treated plan building as a workflow of components rather than spreadsheet-style if-then logic. That gives visibility that differentiates it, but as companies adopt things like cumulative quotas, draws and multi-field earnings rules, QuotaPath must continuously build product to match, whereas a spreadsheet could simply add more if-then rules. Over eight years it matured to handle complex needs such as ASC 606 revenue recognition.
“So there was visibility at the dual level, which is a big differentiator for us, but also causes a lot of challenge when we have to actually continuously build to the market where a spreadsheet could just be, if then, if then, if then, if then, we're not that.”
QuotaPath moved into AI-native services after CFOs said they no longer wanted to handle commissions at all, and found deal sizes expanded when it took the work on.
AJ Bruno gives the example of a CFO with a $150M business and a 15-person RevOps team who, under pressure to automate and create leverage, wanted to stop dealing with commissions. At the start of the year he formed a tiger team and took on a few design partners, and deal sizes expanded quite a bit. Working backwards through the commissions cadence, they found a lot of repeatability: some tasks were binary and automatable, while others were strategic and needed humans in the loop, which is still the case. The service officially launched October 1.
“Commissions is one of those things we just don't want to handle anymore. We don't want to deal with it. And at the beginning of the year, I started to say like, okay, it's a team like let's go create a Tiger team”
QuotaPath's path to AI-native services followed a crawl-walk-run sequence: product, then a benchmarking AI platform, then a combined service that takes the work off customers' plates.
AJ Bruno says the crawl was building the product, the walk was building Atlas, its AI-native service tool containing benchmarking data from 50,000+ reps who use QuotaPath daily, and the run is combining the two to run commissions for customers. QuotaPath still sells seats today, but he says that within the next six to 12 months it will have fully pivoted the business. Whether outcome-based pricing makes sense for QuotaPath is still an open question.
“The run is, how do we combine those two things and just take this off of our customers plate in an AI native service way?”
QuotaPath is testing whether redesigned incentives plus AI-native service guidance can lift a customer's GRR, for example from 70% to 80%.
AJ Bruno says sales incentives are typically not aligned to company objectives, so a company targeting 80% GRR should ask what its incentives would need to look like to get there. QuotaPath's thesis is that building and aligning those incentives, with month-over-month and quarter-over-quarter strategic guidance from an AI-native service, could close a gap such as 70% to 80% GRR. He frames this as an unproven question rather than a result: 'the $100 billion question.'
“can we actually help an organization go from 70 % GRR to 80 % GRR by building the right incentive structure and using an AI native service backing to help strategically guide that month over month, quarter over quarter. That's the $100 billion question”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Retention & customer success Link to this
Gainsight is running the full renewal process for customers' long-tail accounts with AI and humans in the loop, and selling on renewals achieved rather than activities.
Josh Schachter says Gainsight's pitch is that customers sign and Gainsight owns their end-to-end renewal, running the renewal playbook through Gainsight with AI and humans in the loop. For the long tail it promises to take GRR from X to Y, which he calls low-hanging fruit because unassigned accounts can be given 'AI human in a loop' coverage. It will not sell on calls made or plays run, but on outcomes like 'we renewed this guy.'
“You sign on the dotted line, we are owning your end -to -end renewal.”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Retention & customer success Link to this
Trust is the hardest part of selling AI-native services, because customers must accept 'don't worry about how we do it.'
After Josh Schachter described Gainsight telling customers it will own renewals without worrying about how, AJ Bruno said that is the hardest part because it requires an immense amount of trust. Josh agreed that this trust is something built over years. AJ later compares it to QuotaPath, where customers hand over the keys to parts of their data and tech stack.
“But that's the hardest part, though. Don't worry about how we do it is, like, that there's a immense amount of trust that has to go into this process.”
QuotaPath plans to reach outcome-based pricing by first proving cost savings on a flat platform fee, then proposing outcome-focused changes using that customer's data.
AJ Bruno describes a crawl-walk-run pricing approach: start by showing QuotaPath can run comp and save customers money on a flat platform fee. Once that works, review the customer's data and propose doing things differently next year to test further savings or gains. He says comp has always been about being a performance driver.
“let's just prove out that we can do this and save our customers money on a flat, go ahead and call it a platform fee. Once we're able to do that we can go back and look at that look at the data for those customers and then say like look let's do it this differently next year test this out.”
The biggest risk in outcome-based services is the customer feeling they paid a lot for little, like a tiny steak at an expensive dinner.
AJ Bruno says that with outcomes, the biggest challenge is avoiding the moment when a customer sees the bill and asks what they paid for. He says services vendors must make sure that is not the case. Josh Schachter added a buyer's view against paying per use: 'I don't want to pay 10 bucks every time I wear my pair of jeans.'
“You don't want that feeling for services. And we got to, you know, make sure that that's not the case.”
Launching an AI-native services line inside a mature company is like building a startup within a startup, with product-market fit and ICP back in question.
AJ Bruno says the new motion takes him back to QuotaPath's early days, working through product-market fit and ICP. He is on the road seven out of eight weeks, hosting dinners in different cities and talking with CFOs to see if the model will work.
“I mean, I'm building a startup within a startup. It's a product market fit conversation. It's an ICP. It's back to the early days.”
Founders reinventing their company still have to hit the current plan, because board trust is earned only by meeting short-term expectations.
AJ Bruno says his biggest worry about the pivot is hitting plan this quarter, because nothing else is possible without hitting growth targets. He says 30-40% growth used to be good and even great for companies at Gainsight's and QuotaPath's scale, but now some board members lose interest unless you grow wildly faster. He sees excelling and meeting expectations as the only way to earn the board's trust.
“we're both in an era where 30 to 40 % growth was good enough and great, actually. But now, if you're not growing 3 ,000 % day over day, apparently, you're out of sight out of mind from some of your board members.”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Fundraising & investors Link to this
Paying variable commission makes no sense unless it incentivizes a specific behavior tied to company objectives that reps can see.
AJ Bruno started QuotaPath after reps at his previous company repeatedly complained each quarter that they weren't paid correctly, which he traced to a spreadsheet problem rather than cash flow. His conclusion is that if company objectives aren't matched to incentives and reps lack visibility into them, comp becomes a mess.
“if you don't match company objectives to incentives, reps and reps don't have visibility to it. It's just like, it's a mess. It's a total mess. And so why are you even paying a variable commission comp if you don't actually have a behavior that you want to incentivize?”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Sales team, hiring & comp Link to this
High-flying AI-native companies are back in the office working late, a return of 2015-era hustle culture.
One speaker described seeing about 40 people in Harvey's San Francisco office at 9:30 pm, which reminded him of closing nights with a 150-person sales team around 2015. He said the high-flying AI natives are back in the office and that he respects it, though as a 41-year-old with three daughters he couldn't do it himself. In the same exchange, one speaker said two to three office days a week would be ideal, but that a company chasing an IPO and growing 300% a year makes a different choice.
“It's back, man. And office is back. The AI natives, the ones that are high flying, they're back in the office.”