Jason Ambrose, CEO of People.ai, explains the rebrand to Backstory, an AI platform that aggregates emails and transcripts to reveal the hidden story behind deals. The tool acts like a detective, helping salespeople uncover why deals stall and build trust through contextual outreach.
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Hi, my name is Gerhard Schwartner and welcome to Selling Power TV. Today we have a very special guest, Jason Ambrose. He is the CEO of People.ai and you have a new story to tell.
We do, Gerhard. It's, uh, this is my last interview as the CEO of People.ai. From here on out, we're renaming the company Backstory. Very excited about the brand change, very excited about profile and identity that fits the value that we bring to customers.
What does Backstory signal to a sales leader or a CEO that the old brand didn't?
Let's start first with people AI. And if you break it down, we were so early on 9 years ago where AI was a new thing, and that was a differentiating characteristic, was to be an AI company. But as we've all seen, AI is everywhere. So what are you left with? You're left with people as a word and a defining characteristic. So there's a lot of ways to misconstrue who we are and what we do and didn't really connect to the value that we provide to our customers. When we started this process and we came across Backstory, I think it jumped out to all of us of, yes, that's it. The classic question that we see in our customers is, hey, what's the backstory on this deal? Or what's the backstory on what's going on in this account? And that backstory is coming from the communications, the interactions, all of that information that we collect for our AI to write that backstory and provide it to our customers where they want it.
I remember you compared the work of a sales rep to that of Sherlock Holmes, who is trying to piece together the deal history. How does backstory reflect that new reality?
What's powerful about the platform is that it looks to everything, everything that you give us, right? All of those transcripts, all of those email communications, but it also is smart enough to figure out how to associate that information to the story of what's happening in any particular deal or an account or a contact. And that, that turns out to be very hard to do. I think it's a, it's an interesting character and metaphor because you could say, hey, anybody can be the detective and, and pick up the work, but there's a difference between being really good at your job and, and finding out the information versus putting in the work. And I think that that's the difference between our product and the quality of the backstory that we generate for customers.
In other words, you are creating a reasoning agent for the salesperson that will get the real story when a deal is stuck or more importantly, how to move it forward.
That's the big difference, not just pulling the data together, but exactly as you say, we have what we call our revenue reasoning layer that works through the question that you're asking, as we say, to provide answers that are actionable, right? And the depth of what you're getting in the backstory and the reasoning and the quality of that information to help support continuing to reason through what should I go do is a difference between just pulling together a bunch of information.
How does Backstory help the salesperson build trust faster using the data that you captured?
You know, what I experience as an executive when a seller reaches out to me, and I think is true with a lot of customers, is I don't feel sometimes like they do the work on what's been happening between our organizations. A lot of what's out there is just automated, fairly generic outreach, right? But if I get an email that says, Hey, we've been talking to your CRO and we understand the challenges connecting to what you've told the street on how you're gonna grow into this new market and where she sees the challenges in how to deliver that sales target. That's showing that you're paying attention to the conversations that we're having, and it's showing a depth and awareness of what's important to us that, that stands out in the communications. And I'm gonna read that email and I'm gonna respond to that email. There's a lot of different factors to the decision-making on the buyer's side that you need to tap into and be aware of as you reach each of the participants who support that process.
I think there's another challenge that, um, you have resolved for the European clients because they have more complex and more rigorous filters in terms of privacy. I would assume that your AI is addressing that, where you comply with the laws, with the privacy laws. But also you give the salesperson enough of the data they need in order to make more deals.
You're right that the Europeans are very conscious about what you do with the emails that are happening between your employees and the customers between one another. So that filtering is challenging in the sense that we, you know, we've just learned all the different ways that this becomes an issue, not just for the regulatory issues, but for organizations that want a little more thoughtfulness and rigor, that they can enforce the governance of what gets used and where in those answers. And that's come from the past 9 years of living in the world of managing this data and understanding the levers and the controls that we need to put in to filter out what shouldn't be there.
What does that Backstory rebranding help salespeople move towards 100% forecasting accuracy?
How can we truly get 100% accurate when we don't have the full control over the event or the decision-making. Just as in a sports game or whatever else, you can never get to 100% certainty, and that's not really the goal. The goal of the forecasting process is to inspect and understand what are those risks that we can surface and how to make those actionable. And they're the first set of questions that we start asking to get answers that we take back and act on in the organization. And that's the connection to Backstory. We look at this as What you look for in the forecasting process is the first set of actions that you can take to improve the performance that you're expecting to happen.
What is your new URL now?
Backstory.ai. That was the one that we could get. The person who owns .com has had it for like 30 years. They're not even responding to anybody. So we're sticking with AI for now.
