Commercial Account Executive

Onton's AI tackles agentic web trust. Onton has launched Ontology 1, an AI model designed to ensure trustworthy product discovery by combating synthetic content and manipulated recommendations on the agentic web. Key Takeaways * 1 Onton launched Ontology 1, an AI model designed to ensure trustworthiness in agentic web product discovery. * 2 The model aims to combat synthetic content and manipulated recommendations as AI agents increasingly make purchasing decisions. * 3 Benchmarking shows Ontology 1 outperforms existing product discovery platforms in verifying product information. * 4 Onton argues a trust layer is essential infrastructure for autonomous AI commerce, not just a feature. San Francisco-based Onton has unveiled Ontology 1, a new AI model engineered for trustworthy product discovery on the emerging agentic web. This model addresses a critical problem: AI systems increasingly research and execute consumer purchasing decisions, but often rely on manipulated or synthetic information. Built from scratch, Ontology 1 aims to cut through the noise of incentivized recommendations and fake content. Onton's co-founder, Alex Gunnarson, stated, "Everyone is focused on building smarter agents. We're focused on a different question: what should those agents trust?" Outperforming existing discovery platforms. Onton claims its model outperforms dominant players like Google Shopping and Amazon in accuracy benchmarks. The performance gap is most pronounced in verifying product information veracity, a domain historically difficult for AI. For example, an AI agent tasked with finding a sofa under $2,000 might sift through thousands of results, reviews, and influencer posts. Without a reliable way to discern signal from noise, the agent risks recommending products based on untrustworthy data. Onton was built to solve this problem, which the company views as an escalating default state of the internet. A new foundation for agentic commerce. The modern internet was designed for human evaluation, where intuition and skepticism filtered content. As AI agents take over more decision-making, these human filters disappear, leaving systems vulnerable to manipulation. Onton's model evaluates not just what a product is, but the trustworthiness of its surrounding information. It interprets user preferences, including visual inputs, as meaningful data rather than potential noise. This ensures AI agents make recommendations grounded in reliable information. The company also released new research detailing how current AI systems fail when confronted with synthetic content and incentivized recommendations, concluding that existing systems are ill-equipped for this information environment. StartupHub.ai data shows Onton, with a score of 54/100, is still developing its market presence compared to established competitors like Gong (76/100) and Five9 (62/100). Onton's co-founder Zach Hudson emphasized, "The next major internet platform will not be defined solely by who has the best model. It will be defined by who can provide the most trustworthy foundation for those models to operate on." Onton views a trust layer for agentic commerce as a precondition, not a feature. Without it, every AI-powered purchasing decision risks being built on a gamed foundation. With an agentic web authenticity model like Ontology 1, agents can fulfill their promise: helping people make better, faster decisions with reliable information. This approach is critical for trustworthy product discovery AI in a world where skills are the new SDKs for AI agents. Ontology 1 is available today via Onton.com and for partners building on the agentic web requiring a trustworthy foundation for product discovery and recommendation. (C) 2026 StartupHub.ai. All rights reserved. You may not republish this article in full without a license. Search engines and AI research tools may crawl and summarize for reference. Bulk reproduction or model training requires a license. See our terms. Discussion. Join the conversation below

Gainsight builds the team to win in ai-native services for customer retention with three executive appointments. by Gainsight July 7, 2026 Former Dropbox, Gong, ServiceSource, Teradata and Conversica executives bolster enterprise-grade trust as company scales AI-native operations. SAN FRANCISCO, CA - July 7, 2026 - Gainsight, the retention-as-a-service (RaaS) company, today announced three executive appointments, as the company strengthens its commitment to security, trust and AI-native operations at enterprise scale: Grant Clarke as Executive Vice President (EVP) and General Manager (GM) of Atlas; Jack Leidecker as Executive Vice President (EVP) and Chief Security Officer (CSO); and Vijay Jegan as Chief AI & Transformation Officer (CAITO). Clarke will lead the Atlas business unit, building the go-to-market and operations engine needed to scale delivery of AI-native services (AINS); Leidecker will lead the security and compliance program required to support that level of customer trust; and Jegan will lead the company's internal agentic transformation, modernizing the systems and data infrastructure that power the company's own operations. Together, the hires signal Gainsight's commitment to operating as an AI-native, security-first organization that customers trust with their retention and revenue outcomes. "When you tell customers you'll own their outcomes, trust has to be earned in three places all at once: how we protect their data, how intelligently we run our own operations and how well we execute at scale," said Chuck Ganapathi, CEO of Gainsight. "Jack brings the security rigor customers can trust without question, Vijay makes sure we are running our own business with the same AI-native approach we are asking customers to adopt and Grant is building the engine and scaling the model for Atlas AINS. Bringing them on now is a statement about how seriously we take this next chapter and the new kind of company we are becoming." Grant Clarke, EVP & GM, Atlas Grant Clarke joins Gainsight as EVP & GM of Atlas, the company's AINS business that manages renewal motions end-to-end through a combination of AI agents and human oversight. AI agents handle personalization and execution across thousands of accounts, from outreach and follow-ups to contract negotiation. Humans simultaneously provide judgment and intervention at critical moments, with all engagements flowing through the Gainsight platform under outcome-based contracts. Clarke joins from Dropbox, where he served as Head of GTM Operations, leading revenue operations focused on re-engineering customer motions while bringing AI products to market. He brings over 25 years of experience in customer success, retention and revenue operations, including 16 years at ServiceSource (now Concentrix), the leader in outsourced managed services for sales, retention and customer success. "Enterprise companies have tried to solve and scale across long-tail customers with legacy approaches - approaches, like traditional BPOs, that ultimately fail in sustainable value creation because the focus is on cost-cutting and labor arbitrage, which erodes over time," said Clarke. "Atlas changes the equation: combining AI-native execution with Gainsight's deep customer retention expertise to own renewal outcomes at scale. I've spent my career pushing the old playbook as far as it could go and it's an incredible opportunity to architect the new playbook for customer outcomes now that Atlas removes the constraints we were previously working against." Clarke will work closely with Prem Parameswaran, Gainsight's Chief Technology Officer (CTO), who will continue to lead product innovation and technical development. Jack Leidecker, EVP & CSO Jack Leidecker joins Gainsight to lead its global security, privacy, risk and compliance functions, overseeing the company's Information Security organization. Prior to Gainsight, Leidecker served as CISO at Gong and held security leadership roles at Teradata and Digital Realty. This appointment builds on Gainsight's continued investment in its security program. The rapid advancement of frontier AI models continues to reshape the threat landscape, introducing new attack vectors and raising the stakes for enterprise data protection. In this role, Leidecker will lead the company's cybersecurity strategy, embedding security across the organization to ensure security keeps pace with innovation, safeguarding product development, customer trust and continued business growth. "Gainsight has built a strong security foundation and my job is to take it to the next level," said Leidecker. "As agentic AI takes on more of the work, the stakes go up: you're not just protecting data, you're protecting outcomes. I'm here to make sure our customers can delegate that responsibility to us with complete confidence." Vijay Jegan, CAITO Vijay Jegan joins as CAITO to lead the company's internal technology strategy and agentic transformation efforts. Jegan was most recently CTO at Conversica, where he led the modernization of the company's AI platform and drove meaningful operational improvements through applied AI. Before that, he served as CTO at Tact.ai, where he helped build and scale an AI-powered customer engagement platform. "Gainsight is doing something most enterprise software companies won't: putting their business model on the line by owning the outcome," said Jegan. "That only works if we're running as an AI-native operation internally, not just delivering it for customers. We have 15 years of institutional knowledge about what drives retention, and my job is to make sure we're turning that into an internal AI advantage, so everything we learn compounds into better outcomes for the customers we serve." Clarke, Leidecker and Jegan's appointments follow recent executive hires, reflecting a deliberate effort to build the leadership team that the next chapter of Gainsight requires - one where security, trust and AI transformation are as central to the company's competitive position as product and go-to-market. About Gainsight Gainsight is the retention engine behind the world's most customer-centric companies. The Gainsight platform orchestrates the customer journey from onboarding to outcomes. More than 2,000 companies trust Gainsight's applications and AI agents to drive learning, adoption, community connection and success for their customers. Learn more at www.gainsight.com. Media Contact

Gong, a revenue AI company, is now available in Microsoft Marketplace and has deepened its collaboration with Microsoft to embed AI-powered customer insights into enterprise workflows. The partnership enables organisations to purchase Gong using Azure Consumption Commitments whilst integrating its Revenue Graph across Microsoft tools. The collaboration supports Model Context Protocol, allowing Microsoft 365 Copilot to access Gong's revenue AI and agents for contextualised recommendations based on customer data. Gong's insights integrate across Copilot, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Copilot Studio, automatically capturing and structuring customer interactions with AI-generated summaries. The platform serves over 5,000 companies globally. MCP support is now live, with full marketplace availability announced.