Dead Model Walking: Why Agentic AI Breaks the Business of Software, and the Model That Wins

By Fessal Rahman

YOUR AI WORKS. YOUR BUSINESS MODEL DOESN'T.

Across software, the same quiet catastrophe is unfolding. Companies bolt agentic AI onto a commercial model built for human seats, fire the people who created their value to pay for it, and call the result transformation. The revenue still arrives. The dashboard stays green. And the model is already dead. It just hasn't heard the news.

Dead Model Walking is the field manual for the largest commercial transformation in a generation. Drawing on two decades inside the commercial engines of software, telecoms, and private equity, Fessal Rahman shows why the AI margin crisis is not a technology problem but a commercial-model one, and lays out, in full, the model that replaces the one that is dying.

INSIDE, YOU WILL LEARN:
- Why firing people to fund AI quietly destroys the revenue the market actually pays for
- VRR (Value-Realised Retention), the metric that exposes the decay your NRR is hiding
- The five-pillar operating model that finally captures the value your AI creates
- How to re-price for outcomes, not seats or tokens, without a customer revolt
- How to migrate a live business to the new model without detonating the revenue you already have
- The per-customer moat that compounds daily and cannot be bought, copied, or out-priced
- Where your people go: up into the loop, not out of the door

This is not a book about surviving the agentic age. It is about winning it, with a clear diagnostic, a five-pillar model, a migration plan, and a 90-day starting sequence you can act on Monday morning.

If your software is profitable today but you cannot name the moat that keeps it that way tomorrow, this book is for you.

Build around your customers, or your customers will build around you.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H77XS7TZ
• ISBN13: 9798184916286
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"