Forward Deployed Strategist

AI-first business building autonomous agents for small and mid-sized businesses, under the thesis of Artificial Business Intelligence (A.B.I.) : agents that run inbound, qualification and increasingly the full revenue engine for trades, local services, gyms, clinics and other non-technical operators. Founded in 2023 by Alistair Rollins (Founder/CEO). Trades as AI Agent Group; the original inbound qualification product retains the SalesAPE name. Contracted ARR is in the eight figures and compounding. Product-market fit is established on the core inbound qualification product; the next leg is a multi-product platform. Backed by Northzone and Octopus Ventures across seed and Series A, with Series B in the window. Customers report 40%+ uplift in sales performance after deploying an agent. In several deployments the agent outperforms the human sales staff sitting alongside it. Approximately 70 people across Bath, London and California, with customers across the UK and United States. Context Most of the world’s small businesses have never meaningfully benefited from SaaS. Plumbers, roofers, gym owners, clinics, real estate agents and other owner-operated businesses do not spend their days inside CRMs and dashboards. Their businesses run on conversations: a customer calls, sends a message or fills out a form, and somebody has to respond, understand what they need, qualify the opportunity and move it towards revenue. For two decades software has helped organise that process. AI can now begin to run it. SalesAPE builds autonomous agents that engage inbound customers, understand intent, qualify opportunities, follow up, book appointments and increasingly execute larger parts of the revenue workflow. The product is deliberately not positioned as another piece of software the operator needs to learn. The ambition is closer to giving every small business the best salesperson or commercial operator they have ever employed. That creates a new deployment problem. Every business operates differently. Their sales processes are often undocumented, their data fragmented, their edge cases buried in the heads of their best employees, and their customers behave in ways that cannot be captured in a neat workflow diagram. Deploying autonomous agents successfully therefore requires more than software implementation. It requires someone who can get inside a business, understand how it actually makes money, identify where an agent can create the greatest leverage, and work with customers and engineers to turn that understanding into a production system. That is the Deployment Strategist. Role Overview 1) Reporting and team The Deployment Strategist sits between SalesAPE’s customers, commercial organisation, product team and engineering bench. You will work alongside the people building the agent platform and the teams taking it to market, but your centre of gravity is the customer. Your job is to understand the customer’s business deeply enough to answer four questions: Where is value being lost today? What could an autonomous agent realistically own? What would have to be true for the customer to trust it? How do we prove that it worked? You will then stay close enough to the deployment to make sure the answer survives contact with reality. This is not a conventional implementation role. It is not solutions engineering with a different title, and it is not management consulting. You are expected to own the problem through to measurable commercial impact. 2) Core mandate Find the highest-value problems Work directly with customers to understand how their business actually operates. Map inbound journeys, sales processes, qualification logic, hand-offs, follow-up, booking and conversion. Listen to calls. Read conversations. Sit with operators. Understand where leads disappear, where humans add value, where they introduce latency and where existing software gets ignored. The goal is not to automate everything. It is to identify the places where an autonomous agent can create disproportionate value. Design the deployment Translate messy business processes into systems an agent can operate. Define the workflow, agent behaviour, integrations, escalation paths, guardrails and success metrics required to put an agent into production. Work directly with product and engineering to turn those requirements into deployed systems. Own the outcome A deployment is not successful because the software went live. It is successful because something measurable changed. That might mean higher conversion, faster response times, more appointments booked, better qualification, lower cost-to-serve or revenue that would otherwise have been lost. Establish the baseline, define the target and stay accountable for the result. Embed with strategic customers For the most important deployments, operate as an extension of the customer’s team. Build relationships from the frontline operator through to the owner, CEO or commercial leadership. Understand the incentives and behaviour behind the process, not simply the documented workflow. When something does not work, diagnose it with the customer and the engineering team rather than handing over a support ticket. Expand what the agent can own The first deployment is often the beginning rather than the end. Once SalesAPE is handling inbound qualification, ask what comes next. Follow-up. Reactivation. Booking. Upsell. Customer service. Outbound. Revenue operations. Identify adjacent workflows where the agent already has enough context to take on more work and build the case for expanding the deployment. Feed the field back into the product The Deployment Strategist has one of the highest-bandwidth views of how autonomous agents behave in real businesses. Use it. Identify recurring customer problems, failure modes, missing platform capabilities and patterns that should become product rather than bespoke implementation. The objective is not to build a consulting organisation around SalesAPE. It is to use deployment to make the product increasingly powerful and increasingly repeatable. 3) Commercial ownership You will work on strategically important customers from early discovery through deployment and expansion. That requires commercial instinct. You should be able to understand the economics of a customer’s business, quantify the value SalesAPE could create, build the business case and communicate it clearly. You will work alongside the commercial team on complex opportunities, helping customers understand what is technically possible and helping SalesAPE understand what is commercially worth building. For the right opportunities, you will help shape scope, implementation structure and commercial terms. You should be as comfortable discussing conversion economics with a CEO as agent behaviour with an engineer. 4) Technical practice You do not need to be a software engineer. You do need to be technically dangerous. You should understand modern LLM systems, tool use, agent orchestration, APIs, integrations, retrieval, evaluation and the ways production agents fail. You should be capable of interrogating traces, understanding why an agent behaved unexpectedly, prototyping an idea and communicating credibly with engineers about what needs to change. Basic Python and API fluency are expected. SalesAPE is AI-native internally. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and equivalent tools are part of the working environment, and you should be comfortable using AI to compress analysis, prototyping and delivery cycles dramatically. 5) What the work looks like No two deployments will look the same. One week you might be sitting with a home-services company understanding why half of its inbound enquiries never turn into booked jobs. The next you might be analysing thousands of agent conversations to understand why qualification performance differs between customer cohorts. You might spend the morning with engineering redesigning an escalation path, the afternoon demonstrating a new workflow to a customer CEO, and the evening turning what you learned into a repeatable deployment playbook. Over time, the job is to make that process faster. Every deployment should teach SalesAPE something that makes the next hundred deployments better. Profile Overview The successful candidate combines commercial judgement, technical aptitude and unusual curiosity about how businesses actually work. They are comfortable walking into an unfamiliar company, asking basic questions without embarrassment, getting underneath how money moves through the organisation and turning what they learn into a structured deployment. They are not satisfied with delivering recommendations. They want to see the thing running. They can operate with engineers without pretending to be one, and with commercial teams without becoming a salesperson. They are energised by ambiguity and by the prospect of taking frontier AI out of technology companies and putting it to work inside the businesses that make up most of the economy.

BUSINESS PROBLEM SOLVER

Can take an ambiguous commercial problem and reduce it to its underlying workflow, economics and constraints. Naturally asks how the business actually works before asking what technology should be deployed.

CUSTOMER-OBSESSED

Comfortable spending meaningful time with customers and frontline users. Listens to calls, reads conversations and watches workflows rather than relying solely on what senior stakeholders say happens.

AI-NATIVE

Uses frontier AI tools daily and understands modern agent systems well enough to reason about their capabilities and limitations. Curious about what has become possible this month rather than anchored to what was possible last year.

TECHNICALLY CREDIBLE

Comfortable with APIs, integrations, LLMs and agent architectures. Basic Python proficiency. Able to prototype, inspect agent behaviour and work effectively with engineers.

COMMERCIALLY FLUENT

Understands revenue, conversion, unit economics and ROI. Can connect technical capability directly to business value and communicate that case to an owner, CEO or commercial leader.

OUTCOME-ORIENTED

Measures success in customer results rather than completed implementation tasks. Wants to know whether conversion increased, response times fell or more revenue was captured.

PRODUCT INSTINCT

Can distinguish between a customer-specific requirement and a signal that the underlying product needs to change. Constantly looks for patterns that turn bespoke deployments into scalable platform capability.

HIGH OWNERSHIP

Does not throw problems across organisational boundaries. If a deployment is not working, stays with the problem until the reason is understood and the right people are solving it.

COMMUNICATOR

Can take complicated technical systems and explain them simply. Equally credible with engineers, commercial teams, owner-operators and senior executives.

COMFORTABLE IN THE REAL ECONOMY

Interested in how gyms, clinics, trades, property businesses and local service companies actually operate. Understands that deploying AI for a roofing company is a fundamentally different problem from selling another SaaS dashboard to a technology company - and finds that interesting rather than inconvenient. Why this role The first wave of generative AI was about giving people better tools. The next is about giving businesses autonomous workers. For small businesses in particular, that transition could be profound. They do not need another dashboard. They need technology capable of understanding what is happening, making decisions and doing the work. SalesAPE already has agents operating inside thousands of real customer conversations and a core product with established product-market fit. The Deployment Strategist sits at the frontier of what comes next: discovering how much more of the business an agent can own, proving it with customers, and turning those discoveries into the platform. #J-18808-Ljbffr SalesAPE.ai