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
Backstory, the AI platform for revenue teams (formerly People.ai), 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.
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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.”
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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.
