A Book by Ed Fassio · First edition, 2026

The Last Human in the Deal

Selling on the Agentic Frontier

The Last Human in the Deal book cover

The Last Human in the Deal is a field guide to selling on the agentic frontier, where AI joins the deal and the human moments of trust, judgment, creativity, and negotiation become more valuable. Buyers can research vendors, compare options, and arrive with preferences before a seller is involved. The work that remains is not pretending to know more than the machine; it is knowing what is wrong, what is true for this building, what to ask, who to believe, and who will put a name on the call.

Ed Fassio writes from thirty-five years in sales and enterprise technology, using stories from real rooms to show sellers how to stay close to the decision, earn enough trust to hear what is true, and remain accountable for what happens next. The book is for B2B sellers, sales leaders, operators, and anyone whose expertise is being reshaped by agentic AI.

The five moves

This is not a replacement funnel. A stage is a place a deal sits; a move is a thing you do. The five moves address the five wounds left by AI-shaped buying, and they do not have to run in sequence.

Move 1: Presence

Get into the deal before the deal by showing up where shortlists form: through published judgment, references, classrooms, and communities where your name travels without you.

Move 2: Provocation

Arrive with a specific hypothesis about the buyer's building, formed in preparation and offered for correction. The goal is not applause; it is the nod that says the room needed that truth.

Move 3: Proximity

Close the distance between what you say and what the buyer can see by building on their material, in their building, with their people watching, against a baseline they helped set.

Move 4: Permission

Name the fear before it kills the deal: the risk, liability, governance concern, or internal consequence that makes it unsafe for someone to say what is really happening.

Move 5: Persistence

Sell past the signature on purpose. Know which failure mode is stalking the deployment, show up when one call outweighs a quarter of delivery meetings, and make the win mean something after the gong.

Four parts, 20 chapters

Part One: The Collapse

What already broke.

  1. Are You Drunk?
  2. Everybody Has the Answers Now, Which Is Great News for Exactly One of Us
  3. Nobody Complains About the Thing That's Killing Them
  4. The ROI Slide Is a Beautiful Lie and We All Signed Off on It
  5. Congratulations on the Deal, Sorry About the Outcome
  6. You're Not Losing to Salesforce. You're Losing to a Guy Named Kevin.

Part Two: The Five Moves

What to do, roughly in the order you would do it.

  1. Five Moves, Not a Funnel
  2. Presence: Getting Into the Deal Before the Deal
  3. Provocation, Part One: Preparation Is the New Expertise
  4. Provocation, Part Two: The First Ten Minutes
  5. Proximity, Part One: Build It in the Room
  6. Proximity, Part Two: Making the Value Visible
  7. Permission: The No That Never Gets Said
  8. Persistence: The Move Nobody Pays For

Part Three: The Firm

How to build the work across more than one human being.

  1. You Can't Certify Judgment
  2. A Familiar Face in a Strange Land
  3. What the Firm Remembers
  4. The Second Gong

Part Four: The Closing Window

What automates, when, and what is left.

  1. The Honest Inventory
  2. The Last Human in the Deal

An excerpt

“The gap between what you knew and what they knew was the room where you earned a living. That gap is gone. Not closing. Gone.”

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