How a Chief Engineering Officer Automates Customer Prep, Scheduling & Reports with AI | Ali Pourshahid of Solace

In this episode of This New Way, Aydin sits down with Ali Pourshahid, Chief Engineering Officer at Solace, to explore how he’s woven AI into his daily routines as a technology executive. Ali shares real demos of how he uses Solace’s Agent Mesh and other AI tools to:Generate security-focused slide decks from Confluence in minutesSchedule a 12-person leadership offsite without lifting a fingerTransform messy Word reports into polished heat maps for government updatesAutomate customer support workflows across Jira, CRM, and internal systemsAli also breaks down how Solace is productizing their internal AI system, why agent-to-agent communication (A2A) is critical, and how to build a culture of experimentation with “AI champions” inside your company.This is a masterclass in how executives can stop just “keeping up” with AI—and instead lead the charge.Timestamps0:58 – What is Solace and Ali’s role as Head of Engineering2:09 – Ali’s daily “AI deep hour” and why he treats it like a workout3:19 – Prepping for a customer security call with AI + Confluence5:14 – Auto-generated sequence diagrams and value slides in minutes9:48 – Using Microsoft Copilot to instantly format professional slides13:35 – AI as an executive assistant: scheduling a 12-person workshop17:01 – Turning unstructured Word reports into project heat maps20:07 – Building an AI champions group and lightning talks at Solace25:05 – Solace Agent Mesh: event-driven architecture for agents29:01 – Live demo: Automating Jira support tickets with agent workflows33:33 – Scaling digital employees with orchestrator agents37:08 – Why evals are critical for testing and deploying AI agents39:05 – Ali’s habit: always ask “How can I do this better with AI?”40:08 – What excites Ali most about AI in the next yearTools & Technologies Mentioned:Solace Agent Mesh – Multi-agent orchestration platform built by SolaceConfluence – Wiki where AI pulls technical details for slide prepClaude & ChatGPT – LLMs used for connecting to internal toolsMCP (Model Context Protocol) – Framework for securely connecting AI to enterprise dataMicrosoft Copilot – AI inside PowerPoint, Excel, and other Office toolsMermaid – Visualization tool for generating diagrams and heat mapsA2A Protocol (Agent-to-Agent) – Open standard for agent communication donated by GoogleSubscribe at⁠ thisnewway.com⁠ to get the step-by-step playbooks, tools, and workflows.