Architecting for the Enterprise
Behind the Enterprise

When I joined the AAA account, ACE and ACG were already Field Service customers — and they were struggling. The product had real challenges: a difficult Gantt experience, Field Service Mobile issues, and serious outages that caused real operational disruption. For a brand built on showing up for members in their worst moments, platform failures during a tow dispatch aren’t just a technical problem. They’re a trust problem. The scale of our ambition — rolling Field Service across twenty-plus clubs — depended entirely on getting the big two right first.

I invested in understanding the business at ground level: sitting with dispatchers, listening in on call center operations, joining them in the field across multiple states, and driving in tow trucks — including one intense day in Denver during a flash flooding incident, simultaneously debugging a Field Service Mobile issue while the driver navigated closed roads. Being that present built a different kind of trust.

AAA Mountain West Group represented both the hardest moment and the clearest proof of what trust-building made possible. At one point, Salesforce’s presence there was explicitly unwelcome. I focused on listening, showing up consistently, and building credibility one interaction at a time — until we went from not welcome in the building to co-authoring a future state roadmap together. MWG became one of the strongest relationships in the federation.

With the relationship rebuilt, I designed the Future of ERS architecture: Financial Services Cloud as the base license across every club — a deliberate commitment to a consistent data model that could scale federation-wide. On that foundation: Appointment Assist for real-time last-mile member updates; Digital Engagement for proactive call deflection; and a custom Digital Roadside Request (DRR) flow — a self-service UI I designed in Figma. ERS stopped being a product we were defending. It became the connective tissue of AAA’s member experience platform. The FY24 AMER Trust Award recognized this work formally. What it represents is simpler: staying in the hardest moments is what makes everything else possible.

When Salesforce acquired Regrello and AFO was still brand new — no field playbook, no FINS reference architecture — I was selected as one of four founding Tiger Team members to build the practice from scratch. By the time I walked this into ACG, I had spent months learning the product by building it. I knew it well enough to translate it for an insurance customer in operational terms they could act on.

I had been watching ACG’s challenges for years: approvals moving at human speed, handoffs creating friction and delay, operations teams doing work that shouldn’t require human hands. When AFO became real, I saw the fit immediately — and raised it before anyone had mapped an insurance use case for this product.

I led with a conversation, not a demo. I coordinated a Salesforce Innovation Center session at the New York World Tour, bringing the AFO founding team and ACG stakeholders together for the first time — spending weeks preparing both sides to ensure ACG came in with the right questions and the founding team understood what ACG’s environment actually looked like. The session generated more use case depth than either side had fully anticipated, shifting the conversation from “interesting product” to “what would this actually look like for us?”

What followed were months of use case ideation, process mapping, and technical design — culminating in one of the first-ever AFO POCs in FINS and insurance. With no existing playbook on either side, I was the connective layer: translating what a brand-new product could do into something an insurance customer could act on, and guiding both through genuinely new territory. The POC was highly successful. The $500K ACV mattered; establishing what an AFO deal in financial services looks like mattered more. The lessons fed directly back to the Tiger Team to accelerate everything behind it.

This deal starts years before the first signature. Early in my time on the AAA account, I had a conviction: Membership was the next major frontier. AAA’s membership model — 64 million members, the reason the brand exists — was running on fragmented legacy systems. Data fell through the cracks between siloed platforms, billing and renewals were inefficient, and members experienced AAA as four separate vendors. I believed Salesforce could change that. The technology just wasn’t there yet.

We explored Subscription Management, were honest that it wasn’t ready, and kept watching the roadmap. When Revenue Cloud Advanced became a credible product, I went deep — pulling in product experts and testing what it could do for a membership model that didn’t fit neatly into B2C or B2B patterns. I built the vision: a unified catalog spanning Membership, Insurance, Automotive, and Travel; usage-based pricing reflecting AAA’s multi-tier structure; and a Field Service integration validating entitlements in real time at dispatch. No one had built this architecture for a membership organization before.

The first deal was ACE. We didn’t have a specialty team, so I led the full cycle — pulling in specialists, building custom UI components, architectural diagrams, and connected ecosystem plans. We closed ACE. That was the first-ever AAA Membership Revenue Cloud win.

After ACE, we gained access to a new specialist SE, Kingsley. I onboarded him into the AAA ecosystem and together we built the “Golden AAA Membership Solution” — a reusable demo, first-call decks, architecture diagrams, and journey maps designed to move fast across the federation.

The ACG story started on-site in Dearborn, Michigan. I walked Scott VerBrackin — VP of Automotive stepping into oversight of Membership — through the product, the architecture, and my vision for a truly connected member experience. He was immediately bought in. The years of executive trust we’d built with ACG cleared the path; the cycle moved quickly and we closed the deal. ACA and MWG followed into active conversations. This wasn’t a product that existed for a membership company. We made it one.

By the time the ACG Voice deal closed, ACE had already proven Agentforce could run in production for roadside assistance. The question for ACG was harder: could it handle inbound member calls at scale — with live Genesys telephony, in a regulated insurance environment — reliably enough to replace human agents for one of the highest-volume interactions in their contact center?

ACG processes approximately 4 million member calls per year. Proof of Insurance requests alone represent 30–40% of total inbound volume: necessary, high-frequency, and expensive to staff. No one in FINS had fully answered this question yet.

I drove the engagement architecture from the start — co-running hands-on workshops and joint build sessions that brought ACG’s technical team in as active decision-makers. I led the agentic ideation sessions, collaborated with technical architects on enterprise architecture design, and built the technical demo together with the specialist SE and AI AE. I then produced it into the video that became the central artifact of the deal: a complex, multi-system AI interaction made real and achievable in a format the customer could watch, share, and act on. That asset didn’t just close this deal — it opened the next ten conversations.

The results were decisive. The agent went live and scaled across all 14 operating states within weeks — at the request of the CEO. 86% member containment. Average handle time from 7 minutes to 1 minute 34 seconds. 24/7 Proof of Insurance access. Those outcomes directly secured a 3-year, $9M TCV Agentforce pre-commit the following day, and FDE funding was awarded to ACG.

The AI momentum at AAA extends beyond ACG. At ACE, ‘Agent Kimmy’ achieved 84.9% message handling without live agent intervention, and ‘Otto’ reduced cost-per-call from $7 to $0.50, automating 20,000 monthly appointments. ACE became the #1 Agentforce consumer in FINS. Together, ACE and ACG established AAA as the flagship AI proof point for the sector — seeding an estimated $5–7M in federation-wide AI pipeline.