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AI is driving success at AAA Northeast

Artificial intelligence (AI) doesn’t just inform decisions at AAA Northeast, it has the keys and takes the wheel, says company president and CEO John Galvin ’91MBA. “We had to let some senior leaders go because they felt that data should just advise them,” says Galvin, who spoke to the Bryant community on March 28 about […]

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3 months ago

April 4, 2025

Your Sports Nation

Artificial intelligence (AI) doesn’t just inform decisions at AAA Northeast, it has the keys and takes the wheel, says company president and CEO John Galvin ’91MBA.

“We had to let some senior leaders go because they felt that data should just advise them,” says Galvin, who spoke to the Bryant community on March 28 about creating value from AI in business. “I think data is customers telling us what they need, so we need to let it drive us.”

That attitude is a far cry from the culture Galvin encountered when he arrived at AAA after a long career as chief financial officer at tour company Collette. “I didn’t even get a laptop — they didn’t believe in tech,” he says.

That all began to change about eight years ago when, under Galvin’s leadership, AAA partnered with Adobe as an alpha-test site for the company’s developing AI program. “We were popular with their product development team because we were in a lot of product lines they were interested in and had a lot of members and data,” recalls Galvin.

AAA’s diverse business includes providing roadside assistance, travel planning, and insurance. A not-for-profit corporation, AAA is a service-oriented company, so the top goal for AI integration was providing a personalized experience; others included optimizing marketing and tracking sales and cross-selling across product lines.

Galvin says a culture that accepts failure and constant testing has been necessary to build AAA’s AI infrastructure. “You’ve got to be innovative and creative to make this work,” he says.

Today, approximately 70 percent of new AAA memberships are generated online, and the company uses AI for near-constant monitoring of customer activity, says Lisa Melton, chief marketing officer at AAA Northeast. “We have a digital-first mindset,” she says.

“We have a digital-first mindset.”

“We used to flood people with marketing, and overwhelmed them,” Melton says. “We took our entire marketing team in-house and used AI to optimize our marketing on a near real-time basis. There are a lot of things our members don’t know about us, but now we can see who, what, and how about how prospects are converted to sales.”

Melton is a believer in following the lead of AI in marketing because it allows her to see the process and results “from start to finish,” she says.

Mark Pelletier, AAA’s senior vice president for digital business strategy and e-commerce, says the company can now look at data anomalies and adapt to them daily. “It gives us the ability to act quickly,” he says.

AI provides AAA with trends analysis and generates customer profiles based on millions of data points gathered from interactions via the Internet, phone, mail, call center, purchases, and the company’s CRM system. It’s used to predict the success of individual marketing campaigns, target e-mail marketing, and improve internal workflow.

On the membership side, “We can tell [agentic] AI to go find people you think want to join AAA,” says Pelletier. AI-driven predictive algorithms and propensity models have yielded insights like the fact that Gen Z members living in urban areas like to rent cars for daily living, not just on vacation.

“We can tell AI to go find people you think want to join AAA.”

Interestingly, however, AAA has not employed generative AI in the form of a chatbot, which Galvin says runs counter to the goal of delivering personalized service.

Galvin’s MBA alma mater has aided in AAA’s success. Bryant students in the “Big Data Analytics and Data Science” capstone courses taught by Suhong Li, Ph.D., chair of the Information Systems and Analytics Department, have for several years used large data sets from AAA to profile and segment members based on demographic information and their history of interacting with the company.

Student projects also have helped AAA identify cross-selling opportunities, predict the likelihood of membership cancellation, estimate the probability of members purchasing AAA insurance products, forecast annual travel sales, and predict customer propensity for booking cruises, says Li.

Pelletier admits that the company has become “wholly dependent” on AI, and Galvin says, “we would need an army of analysts if we didn’t have AI.”

“We would need an army of analysts if we didn’t have AI.”

The bottom-line result of the lap of faith with AI, however, has been $200-million growth in AAA’s travel business.

Galvin says employees of companies that fully integrate AI into their operations need to adapt to the technology, not fear it. Pelletier told Bryant students and faculty that AAA is looking for job applicants who are familiar with data and can be trained but, more importantly, are “naturally inquisitive, like teamwork, and are comfortable with failure.”

“We still need people to guide AI, not set and forget it,” he says.

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Georgia’s new NIL partnership should have other schools very worried

College football has been the wild west in the NIL and transfer portal era, but finally, the House v. NCAA settlement that went into effect on July 1 is attempting to bring an end to the total lawlessness. The settlement allows athletic departments to pay athletes directly, but only from a revenue-sharing pool that is […]

Published

3 seconds ago

July 2, 2025

Your Sports Nation

Outside NIL payments are still permitted, but they now have to go through a clearinghouse to ensure that they are market value and are not pay-for-play deals disguised as marketing opportunities.

The teams that organized their NIL collectives earliest had the most success in the early NIL era because they were able to outspend their opponents, particularly on the recruiting trail and transfer portal market. Now, that advantage has been leveled, with every program operating with the same revenue-sharing budget, so head coaches and general managers are scrambling to find a way to get a leg up in the new environment.

The most obvious place to look for an advantage is with outside NIL funding that will get through the clearinghouse. To compete in that market, Georgia has announced a new partnership with Learfield to handle most of its athletes’ NIL opportunities.

Founded in 1972 as a farm radio network in Missouri, Learfield has adapted into one of the leading media and technology companies in college athletics with the mission of “Powering the connection of fans to the brands and experiences they love.”

Learfield partners with 137 colleges in some capacity, now including the Georgia Bulldogs, but just because the SEC powerhouse wasn’t first to this model, which will effectively replace its Classic City Collective, doesn’t make it any less scary for the rest of the conference and college football.

With so much high school football talent in and around the Atlanta area, Georgia was long a sleeping giant before Kirby Smart arrived. Then, Smart tapped into those resources and rode them to a national championship. Now, with the Bulldogs as perennial title contenders, if the athletic department has found another way to get their athletes paid beyond the revenue-sharing money, then there’s no reason to believe that Georgia football will be knocked off its perch anytime soon.

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16 minutes ago

July 2, 2025

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In order to improve our site, you can inform us that someone else has an incorrect link to our site, or that one of our links is broken. We will do our best to address the issue.

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Former Auburn baseball star Sonny DiChiara announces retirement from baseball

Sonny DiChiara is stepping away from baseball. The former Auburn slugger announced his retirement from the game on Wednesday in a heartfelt post to X. “Thank you baseball,” DiChiara wrote. “Officially putting the game behind me as I move forward into my next path in life. So many people to thank for getting me to […]

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17 minutes ago

July 2, 2025

Your Sports Nation

Sonny DiChiara is stepping away from baseball. The former Auburn slugger announced his retirement from the game on Wednesday in a heartfelt post to X.

“Thank you baseball,” DiChiara wrote. “Officially putting the game behind me as I move forward into my next path in life. So many people to thank for getting me to where I made it today. Not sad it is over, just blessed that it even happened.”

Thank you baseball. Officially putting the game behind me as I move forward into my next path in life. So many people to thank for getting me to where I made it today. Not sad it is over, just blessed that it even happened pic.twitter.com/ZcEIZilprs

— Sonny DiChiara (@SonnyDichiara) July 2, 2025

DiChiara had spent the past four years in the minor leagues after being selected in the fifth round of the 2022 MLB Draft by the Los Angeles Angels. Most of his time came with the team’s Double A affiliate, the Rocket City Trash Pandas.

He played 145 games for the Trash Pandas across three seasons and put up a batting average of .198 with 13 home runs and 59 RBI. DiChiara also played for the Inland Empire 66ers, Tri-City Dust Devils and Salt Lake Bees.

This story will be updated.

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The return of EA Sports College Basketball is a gift from above for Duke fans

EA Sports recently announced the return of the EA Sports College Basketball video game, which is expected to be released in 2028. Duke fans can now spend the next few years manifesting how incredible it would’ve been to play with some past Blue Devils, and also what it will be like to play the game […]

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33 minutes ago

July 2, 2025

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Blue Devil fans have lost out big time on playing with some elite athletes that have come out of Durham. The name that comes to mind first has to be Zion Williamson, who almost certainly would’ve been a 99 overall had the game existed during his time at Duke back in the 2018-19 season. Williamson might’ve been the most unstoppable force the game had seen up to that point. With his athleticism, size, speed, and talent, he would’ve looked more like a player generated on a “my career” setting than an actual player available in the game.

Beyond Williamson himself, the 2018-19 Duke basketball team would’ve been insanely popular if the game were a thing back then. The three star freshmen who took over college basketball that season in Williamson, RJ Barrett, and Cam Reddish would’ve sent fans wild.

Aside from those three, there are plenty of former Duke players who fans will unfortunately never have the experience of using in a virtual setting. EA Sports hasn’t released a college hoops video game since 2009, meaning guys like Tyus Jones, Quinn Cook, Cooper Flagg, Kyrie Irving, Kyle Singler, and so many more have been left by the wayside. Even current Blue Devils head coach Jon Scheyer would’ve been an awesome player to use in the game.

However, this also means that Duke fans will have the opportunity to play with the next generation of star players to come through Durham. Scheyer has been a recruiting mastermind since becoming the head coach at Duke, securing the No. 1 overall recruiting class in two of his first three seasons. He’s sent guys like Flagg, Kon Knueppel, Jeremy Roach, and Kyle Filipowski through the program. So, Blue Devil fans can spend the next few years imagining all of the star talent they will be able to use when EA Sports releases its first edition of College Basketball in almost two decades.

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Ohio State receiver Jeremiah Smith signs surprising NIL shoe deal

Shoe allegiances can run almost as deep as a favorite college football program. When you can marry the two together, perhaps in charge of marketing may have something special. That appears to be the case with Ohio State star receiver Jeremiah Smith and Adidas, because according to a social media post on Tuesday, it appears […]

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1 hour ago

July 2, 2025

Your Sports Nation

Shoe allegiances can run almost as deep as a favorite college football program. When you can marry the two together, perhaps in charge of marketing may have something special.

That appears to be the case with Ohio State star receiver Jeremiah Smith and Adidas, because according to a social media post on Tuesday, it appears as though Smith has signed an NIL deal with the popular sports apparel company based in Germany. And if you are like many of us, the fact that it’s not with Nike (the apparel company that sponsors Ohio State) might be a little suprising.

But hey, this is what NIL is for, right? Athletes are able to enter their own partnerships with companies to take advantage of their star power, and kudos to Adidas for recognizing what Smith can be for them as a public figure and spokesperson. Of course, we don’t know the terms of the deal and probably never will, but if you are a Smith and Ohio State fan, now you have conflicting priorities.

One has to wonder what kind of cleats Smith will be wearing when he runs out of the tunnel on Aug. 30. Somewhere, there has to be contract language that spells out how this whole thing is going to work. And maybe, just maybe, down the line we’ll get to see some Jeremiah Smith Adidas cleats we can all get our hands on.

Contact/Follow us @BuckeyesWire on X (formerly Twitter) and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Ohio State news, notes and opinion. Follow Phil Harrison on X.

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Vandal Soccer Adds Davis to Staff

Story Links MOSCOW, Idaho – University of Idaho Vandal soccer coach Jeremy Clevenger today announced the hire of Inland Northwest native Nick Davis as goalkeepers coach. “We are excited to bring Nick to our soccer program,” Clevenger said. “He brings a ton of energy and passion to the team. In his young career, Nick has some impressive […]

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1 hour ago

July 2, 2025

Your Sports Nation

MOSCOW, Idaho – University of Idaho Vandal soccer coach Jeremy Clevenger today announced the hire of Inland Northwest native Nick Davis as goalkeepers coach.

“We are excited to bring Nick to our soccer program,” Clevenger said. “He brings a ton of energy and passion to the team. In his young career, Nick has some impressive experience that will be a great addition to both the goalkeepers and team overall.”

Davis comes to Moscow from Sewanee University, a DIII university in Tennessee, where he coached the Tiger goalkeepers during the 2024 season. Sewanee recorded 14 shutouts and allowed just six goals all season.

In the Southern Athletic Association play, the Tigers allowed just one goal outscored opponents 5-0 in the SAA tournament before falling in the NCAA Championship First Round.

Prior to his time at Sewanee, he was the assistant at Wheaton College in Illinois. The 2023 team recorded four shutouts and racked up 103 saves.

In 2022, Davis coached Lauren Ketchum to CCIW Goalkeeper of the Year honors. The Thunder recorded seven shutouts and 84 saves on the year.

Before his time at Wheaton, he coached club athletes in the US and in the UK.

He earned a BA in Football Coaching and Development from Plymouth Marjon University in Plymouth, UK, and is a 2018 graduate of Lewis and Clark High School where he was goalkeeper and a kicker for the football team.

“I am extremely excited to be joining the Vandals coaching staff,” Davis said. “I want to thank Jeremy for giving me this opportunity to be part of an amazing program that has shown incredible success over the past few seasons. I can’t wait to join and contribute to this special Vandal family, and I look forward to bringing more championships to Moscow.”

The Vandals have played in each of the last three Big Sky Conference Championship matches, winning the Big Sky tournament title in 2023, advancing to the NCAA tournament.

Over the past three seasons, Idaho has recorded a combined 28 shutouts, including eight last season by returning starter Paula Flores.

The hire is conditional on completion of University of Idaho human resources procedures.