The Augment AI chief executive who looked at the entire sales playbook and decided the wrong person had been cast as the hero.
Most sales founders sell you a faster horse. Andrew Fritts is over in the corner quietly arguing that the horse is the problem.
He runs Augment AI, a Seattle company with a strange and stubborn idea: that the salesperson should stop being the star of the deal. For 25 years he was that star - building and running B2B sales teams, chasing quotas, writing the proposals. Then he flipped the camera around to face the buyer, and most of his industry's habits suddenly looked absurd.
Augment's product is a "Relationship Operating System." In plain terms: every deal generates a blizzard of meetings, calls, notes, follow-ups, CRM fields and Slack threads, and almost none of it lives in one place. Augment pulls it into a shared workspace it calls a Decision Site - a single room where buyer and seller can both see what's happening and what comes next. The deal stops living in someone's inbox.
Figures: Augment AI seed round closed Jan 2022 (Crunchbase / Tracxn).
It's not the sales cycle that matters; it's the decision cycle.
Business-to-Business, Fritts says, points the wrong direction - one company aiming at another. His fix is one letter and a complete reorientation: Business with Business. Treat the buyer as a partner, not a target.
Fritts studied English and Government at Dartmouth. It is not the resume you expect from someone who would spend a career inside revenue orgs, and that is rather the point. He reads the deal like a text - who wants what, who is afraid of what, what is actually being said underneath the agenda.
From there came a quarter-century in the field, including stretches at firms like Accenture and N3, the kind of places where you learn exactly how the sausage of enterprise selling gets made. He saw the aggressive tactics up close: the chasing, the impersonal email blasts, the proposals built to flatter the seller's process rather than the buyer's. He also saw what happened to the buyer on the other side - overwhelmed, under-informed, quietly checking out.
The conclusion he kept arriving at is almost heretical inside a sales culture: the buyer's journey matters more than the seller's funnel. A "decision cycle," not a "sales cycle." His writing in CustomerThink and SalesTechStar circles this idea relentlessly - empathy as a sales technology, trust as the actual product, the buyer cast as the protagonist who needs to be equipped to win internally.
"By elevating the buyer and making them the hero," he writes, "we can create experiences that empower buyers to steer their internal processes." It sounds soft. It is, in fact, ruthlessly practical: deals die in the buyer's own org far more often than they die at the sales table.
Augment AI is the idea turned into software. If the buyer is the hero, give them a stage. The Decision Site is that stage - a shared, structured workspace where the meeting notes write themselves, the next steps are obvious, the risks get flagged, and nobody has to dig through six tools to remember what was promised. AI does the busywork. The humans do the trust.
The pitch of a Relationship Operating System is unglamorous and exactly right: most of what a deal needs already exists, it's just spread across too many places. Augment's job is to gather the mess and make it legible to everyone in the room.
How Augment describes its platform publicly. Decision Site is an Augment product term.
The literature degree that would later read sales conversations like chapters.
Leadership roles across firms including Accenture and N3 - a full education in how enterprise deals really get done.
Seattle-based company founded; closes a $3.45M seed round backed by JAZZ Venture Partners, Flying Fish Ventures, Incisive Ventures and AI2 Incubator.
Columns on empathy, trust and AI in selling for CustomerThink and SalesTechStar - including the BwB manifesto, published March 2025.
Running the Relationship OS, based in San Francisco, company in Seattle.
He's a Dartmouth English and Government double major who ended up writing about sales algorithms.
His whole philosophy renames the category: not B2B, but BwB - Business with Business.
He runs a Seattle company while based in San Francisco.
Decision Site treats a deal like a place you walk into, not a stage in a pipeline.