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 minutes Schedule a 12-person leadership offsite without lifting a finger Transform messy Word reports into polished heat maps for government updates Automate customer support workflows across Jira, CRM, and internal systems Ali 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. Timestamps 0:58 – What is Solace and Ali’s role as Head of Engineering 2:09 – Ali’s daily “AI deep hour” and why he treats it like a workout 3:19 – Prepping for a customer security call with AI + Confluence 5:14 – Auto-generated sequence diagrams and value slides in minutes 9:48 – Using Microsoft Copilot to instantly format professional slides 13:35 – AI as an executive assistant: scheduling a 12-person workshop 17:01 – Turning unstructured Word reports into project heat maps 20:07 – Building an AI champions group and lightning talks at Solace 25:05 – Solace Agent Mesh: event-driven architecture for agents 29:01 – Live demo: Automating Jira support tickets with agent workflows 33:33 – Scaling digital employees with orchestrator agents 37:08 – Why evals are critical for testing and deploying AI agents 39:05 – Ali’s habit: always ask “How can I do this better with AI?” 40:08 – What excites Ali most about AI in the next year Tools & Technologies Mentioned: Solace Agent Mesh – Multi-agent orchestration platform built by Solace Confluence – Wiki where AI pulls technical details for slide prep Claude & ChatGPT – LLMs used for connecting to internal tools MCP (Model Context Protocol) – Framework for securely connecting AI to enterprise data Microsoft Copilot – AI inside PowerPoint, Excel, and other Office tools Mermaid – Visualization tool for generating diagrams and heat maps A2A Protocol (Agent-to-Agent) – Open standard for agent communication donated by Google Subscribe at⁠ thisnewway.com⁠ to get the step-by-step playbooks, tools, and workflows.