Backstory Appoints Former ASAPP Leader as SVP of Customer Value to Drive Outcomes for Enterprise Customers

Seasoned customer success and growth leader brings track record of scaling enterprise value across AI and data-driven platforms

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Backstory (formerly People.ai), the leading AI answers platform for revenue leaders, today announced the appointment of Mackenzie Smith as Senior Vice President of Customer Value. Smith will lead Backstory’s customer success strategy, overseeing value attainment, insights and support to ensure enterprise customers achieve measurable business outcomes from the platform.

Smith joins Backstory with deep expertise spanning customer execution, growth and cross-functional alignment at enterprise technology companies. Most recently, she served as Vice President and Head of Growth at ASAPP, where she led customer execution, value attainment, insights and support partnering across engineering, product and sales to align teams around shared customer outcomes. During her tenure, she helped scale ASAPP’s enterprise business through multiple stages of growth. Before ASAPP, Smith built proprietary advertising technology platforms for clients at IPONWEB and led client engagements for digital advertising at Merkle. Throughout her career, she has worked with clients across industry sectors, bringing diverse teams together to apply technology and analytics toward measurable business value.

"As Backstory's enterprise customers draw us further into being an advisor, having the right leadership to translate AI capability into customer value is so critical,” said Jason Ambrose, CEO of Backstory. "Customers are now asking AI to deliver value from its use, and that requires a combination of understanding the complexity of large enterprise architectures, as well as the business savvy to translate our technology to customer outcomes. Mackenzie is the leader for this next phase, having a proven track record of building the operational models and team structures that turn customer relationships into sustainable business outcomes. She’s exactly the leader we need to ensure our customers get the full value of what Backstory can do for their revenue organizations.”

As AI-powered platforms become central to enterprise revenue operations, customers require a trusted partner invested in their outcomes. Smith’s appointment reflects Backstory’s commitment to delivering not just answers, but business impact. Her background bridging technical teams and customer-facing functions positions her to help revenue leaders get maximum return from the Backstory platform.

“What Backstory has built is genuinely differentiated in a crowded market and we have some of the most AI forward large enterprises to prove it,” said Mackenzie Smith, Senior Vice President of Customer Value at Backstory. “I’ve spent my career helping enterprise customers get measurable value from complex technology, and I’m excited to bring that experience to a platform where the opportunity to do that is so clear. I look forward to working closely with our customers and internal teams to make sure our answers are creating value for our customers.”

To learn more about Backstory, visit backstory.ai.

About Backstory

Backstory is the leading AI answers platform for revenue leaders. With more than a decade of training AI models on billions of sales interactions, Backstory enables modern sales teams to ask questions and get the right answer in the moment directly within their existing AI workflows. Sales leaders from companies like OpenAI, NVIDIA, Red Hat, Five9, Palo Alto Networks, Iron Mountain, TransUnion, Randstad and others rely on Backstory to get trusted answers wrapped in real business context helping them orchestrate deals more effectively and drive revenue.

By connecting every signal to the right accounts and opportunities, Backstory shows teams exactly what is happening and what to do next. Customers across industries including enterprise, cybersecurity, data and analytics, and defense use Backstory to drive trillions in pipeline and revenue.

Recognized by Gartner and Forrester, the Inc. 5000, Y Combinator Top Companies, and the Forbes AI 50, Backstory is based in San Francisco and backed by ICONIQ Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Akkadian Ventures and Mubadala Capital.

Learn more at Backstory.ai and follow us on LinkedIn.