Backstory Names Sam Branson Head of Partnerships to Accelerate Growth Through Strategic Alliances

Appointment reflects Backstory's investment in scalable, partner-led growth as the AI answers platform for revenue teams expands its ecosystem with AWS, Google and Salesforce

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Backstory, the AI platform for revenue teams (formerly People.ai), today announced the appointment of Sam Branson as Head of Partnerships. In this newly created role, Branson will build a strategic partner ecosystem as a core growth engine, defining partnership strategy and the strategic alliances that will accelerate the company's revenue growth and extend its reach across the enterprise.

Branson joins Backstory following nearly four years at Adobe, where he helped build the company's AI partnerships function from the ground up. Earlier at Smartsheet, he drove partnerships with AWS, Salesforce, and Microsoft spanning both co-sell and technology integrations. He moved into partnerships at Amazon, leading Alexa business development across financial services and travel, after six years carrying a quota in telecom and technology sales. At Backstory, he will focus first on deepening strategic platform partnerships, while laying the groundwork for a broader channel and technology partner program.

"Sam has a track record of building partnerships that make a real difference for customers, whether that's deepening our integrations with frontier model providers like Google and OpenAI or simplifying how enterprises procure AI tools, the way he did with AWS,” said Jason Ambrose, CEO of Backstory. “As more revenue teams look to us inside the AI workflows they already use, having someone of Sam's caliber leading our partnerships strategy puts us in a strong position to grow faster and reach more of the sales teams who need us."

Branson's arrival comes as revenue organizations face mounting pressure to grow in a tighter macroeconomic environment and embrace AI as central to their organization. Strategic partners increasingly influence how enterprises evaluate and buy software, and Branson's focus on platform, channel, technology and services partnerships is designed to help Backstory show up in more of those conversations as they are figuring out what their AI stack looks like.

"General-purpose AI is going to answer a lot of questions well. What it can't do on its own is know your deals, your relationships, and the history behind an account. That kind of depth takes years to build, and it makes every AI tool better the moment you connect it," said Sam Branson, Head of Partnerships at Backstory. "The companies building at the frontier of AI run their own revenue teams on Backstory, and that says something about where this category is going. My focus now is getting that context to more sales teams, inside the tools they are already working in."

Branson’s remit includes formalizing partnership frameworks with key enterprise players, expanding on Backstory's existing relationships, and laying the foundation for a broader channel partner program.

Learn more about Backstory’s partner ecosystem: https://www.backstory.ai/platform/partners-integrations

About Backstory

Backstory is the leading AI answers platform for sales teams. 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 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.