Zack Martin · Portfolio

Applied AI, built by someone who has run the operation.

I'm the first Applied AI Solutions Engineer at Solid, a seed-stage startup. I led the shaping of its solutions engineering program and tooling, and I engineer the semantic models and AI agents that enterprise customers put into production. I got here through 15+ years at Best Buy: field service technician, then running delivery and installation logistics across five states, then supply chain transformation.

Outside my full-time job, I chair the board of Wild Coast Trails Association, a trail nonprofit. I also run Tactical Adaptability Group, a freelance consulting practice that teaches AI skills and helps organizations automate their work, and I built TrailAdvocate, a SaaS platform for trail organizations.

Full-time career
Best Buy (15+ years, enterprise retail) → Solid (2024–present, seed-stage AI startup)
Side projects
Wild Coast Trails Association (board chair) · Tactical Adaptability Group · TrailAdvocate · Silicon Marsh Ventures
Zack Martin

Results at a glance

Career progression and side projects

Best Buy and Solid are my full-time career, from field service technician to applied AI. My side projects started in 2022 and run alongside it.

Full-time career milestones

Between my two Best Buy stints, from October 2015 to September 2016, I was a product sourcing and testing specialist at Super Bright LEDs.

Side projects · since 2022

Hiring for a specific role? Filter the stories by focus.

Solid · 2024–present · full-time · seed-stage startup

Applied AI at Solid

Solid automates creating, maintaining, and testing semantic models, using a company's warehouse, BI tools, and query history, and serves those models to AI agents over APIs and MCP. As its first Solutions Engineer, I engineer semantic models for enterprise customers and connect them to the agents that do the work.
Full-time · SolidApplied AI Solutions EngineerDec 2025 – present

Building AI agents that answer correctly and take action

Any LLM can write SQL. Very few know what "active customer" means at your company. Solid's semantic layer carries that meaning; my work is wiring it into the agent tools enterprises already run, and fixing models when the answers drift.

What I did

  1. Connected Solid to the agent frameworks enterprises already use, including CrewAI, Langflow, Microsoft Copilot Studio, Workato, Claude, OpenAI, and MCP-based agents, so agents reach data through governed definitions instead of raw tables.
  2. Built agents that get governed SQL from Solid, run it against the warehouse, and act on the results: posting to Slack, taking actions in business systems, and recommending next steps.
  3. Built a standard agent framework and applied it to use cases in health-insurance claims, pharmacy benefits, banking, and hospitality operations. The agents can take actions across many different systems, with a human in the loop, and work the same way connected to a customer's environment. I share the code with customers who are new to building agents, so their teams can replicate it.
  4. Built a semantic-model improvement agent from what I learned on a stalled pilot. It builds models, checks question coverage, proposes fixes, and flags instruction issues. I architected it to run first as an internal back-office tool and later inside Solid's product, to improve customer outcomes.
  • Any framework

    CrewAI, Langflow, Copilot Studio, Workato, Claude, OpenAI, and MCP-based agents

  • Human in the loop

    Agents that take action across business systems, with a person approving the consequential steps

Where Solid sits

Context and data sources

Data assets
Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery
Documentation
Confluence, Notion, SharePoint
Context
Slack, Teams
Metric definitions
Tableau, Power BI, Looker

Solid semantic layer

Know-how, glossary, and metadata
Semantic models
Generation engine
SQL, metadata, and chat
Solid MCP

AI agents and delivery

AI agents, any framework
CrewAI, Copilot Studio, Claude, OpenAI, Langflow, Workato
Slack and web users

One question, end to end

  1. 1. Someone asks a question in Slack or on the web
  2. 2. Solid MCP generates SQL from the semantic model
  3. 3. The SQL runs in the warehouse with that user's permissions
  4. 4. The agent analyzes the results and acts
  5. 5. Insights, raw data, and the query go back to the user
Human in the loop: agents investigate, recommend, and act across systems, and a person approves the consequential actions.
Adapted from the Architecture Configurator I built for Solid. Solid reads metadata, never moves the data, and generates the SQL; it runs in the customer's warehouse under their own permissions.
More detail
  • Also contributed to the Apache Ossie project by writing a converter for Solid's semantic models: a Python package that converts models between Solid and Ossie in both directions, offline.
1. Diagnose
Which questions fail, and why?
2. Choose a lever
Coverage, instructions, or model fix
3. Apply
One change at a time
4. Re-run
Benchmark again

Repeat until the benchmark moves

Before changing anything, ask which layer failed: the semantic model, the platform, the calling agent, or the evaluation itself.
The loop the semantic-model improvement agent runs.

Tools & tech

  • MCP
  • CrewAI
  • Langflow
  • Copilot Studio
  • Workato
  • Claude
  • OpenAI
  • Python
  • Snowflake
  • Cursor

What I learned

The first question is always which layer failed: the semantic model, the platform, the calling agent, or the evaluation. Changing a model to fix what is really an agent problem just moves the failure somewhere else.
Best Buy · 2008–2024 · full-time

Operations and supply chain at Best Buy

I spent 15+ years at Best Buy, starting as a field service technician and finishing on the supply chain strategy and transformation team. Along the way I learned that a new system only matters once the people in the field use it.
Full-time · Best BuySenior Analyst, Supply Chain Strategy & Transformation2022–2023

Building trailer visibility for a distribution network with no yard management system

Cutting transportation cost was an enterprise goal, and trailers aging in distribution-center yards were a direct line to it. There was no robust yard management system, and building one was on hold behind a warehouse-system migration, so nobody could see which trailers were waiting, what was on them, or for how long. The network made it harder. Best Buy's delivery distribution centers (DDCs) handle large products like appliances, furniture, TVs, and outdoor living, while its regional distribution centers (RDCs) carry nearly everything else that ships in a box. The two ran different warehouse systems with very different flows.

What I did

  1. Defined what the field needed to see: trailer status, contents down to PO and quantity, and age since check-in.
  2. Used SQL to map tables in the transportation and warehouse management systems (TMS and WMS), then designed the logic: create an expected trailer from each TMS appointment and mark it arrived on WMS check-in.
  3. Split it into two reports, one for each DC type's warehouse system, and wireframed both for the data science team to build.
  4. Ran a two-week UAT with field users and transportation analysts, then revised with decision science until sign-off.
  5. Recorded training videos and job aids, trained the national DC network live, and handed ownership to the transportation team.
  • −40%

    Aging trailers per week during peak season

  • 20 DDCs + 6 RDCs

    Best Buy's full U.S. distribution network as of late 2024, on two different warehouse systems

How a trailer becomes visible
  1. TMS appointment
  2. Expected trailer
  3. WMS check-in
  4. Aging clock starts
  5. Field report
More detail
  • The bigger shift: field leaders now watch and own the number themselves, instead of corporate pushing reports out. That freed corporate support to work on process improvement.

Tools & tech

  • SQL
  • TMS
  • WMS
  • Data science partnership
  • Training videos & job aids

What I learned

Adoption was won in UAT, not at launch: the field users who tested the report shaped the version that shipped. I run AI pilots the same way today.

Other projects

Tools and integrations that didn't need a full story.
  • Architecture Configurator

    Solid · 2026

    An interactive, customer-facing tool I built. A prospect picks their industry, their warehouse, documentation, communication, and BI tools, and their AI agent platform, and it generates their AI data architecture with Solid in place: a stack diagram, an end-to-end flow for one question, and an integration brief for each tool they chose. Architectures can be shared by link or saved as a PDF.

  • Starburst integration, end to end

    Solid · Sep 2026

    Contributed to Solid's Starburst integration and demonstrated the full workflow: integration and asset documentation, model building, and export to Starburst Data Products.

    A shared team effort, working end to end in a development release.

  • Solid ↔ Apache Ossie model converter

    Solid · 2026

    Contributed to the Apache Ossie project by writing a converter for Solid's semantic models: a self-contained Python package that converts models between Solid and Ossie in both directions, offline, with no Solid connection required.

How I run a pilot or a rollout

Pick a step to see how I've run pilots and rollouts in different organizations and roles.

Step 1 · Discover

Understand the workflow, the people in it, and the decision the work should change.

At Best Buy · supply chain

I talked to operators and subject-matter experts before automating inter-DC transfers, to understand the problem and its impact.

At Solid · applied AI

I run full customer discoveries before proposing a pilot, to understand what it costs the customer when they can't trust their AI agents' answers.

Step 2 · Write the spec

Turn wish lists into a written scope and success metrics everyone agrees to.

At Best Buy · supply chain

I defined exactly what the field needed to see in yard reporting (status, contents, and age) before anything was built.

At Solid · applied AI

I built templates for defining pilot use cases, the security review, what we need from the customer and from our own team, and internal specs. I use them on every pilot, and so does my team.

Lesson learned: Write the scope and success metric down before kickoff, not after the first disagreement.

Step 3 · Build & integrate

Build it, or partner with the team that does, on whatever technology the organization uses.

At Best Buy · supply chain

I mapped transportation and warehouse system tables in SQL, wrote the EDI feed in Python, and built transfer flows in Power Automate.

At Solid · applied AI

I engineer the semantic layer, then connect it to the customer's agents through MCP, whatever agent tools they plan to use.

Lesson learned: When something fails, do a root-cause analysis. Find which layer failed before changing anything.

Step 4 · Validate & certify

Test with real users and real questions, revise, and get explicit sign-off.

At Best Buy · supply chain

I ran a two-week user acceptance test with field users and transportation analysts, then revised the reports with decision science until sign-off.

At Solid · applied AI

I build the models, then run structured evaluations and benchmark rounds, adding question coverage until the models can be certified at 94–100% accuracy.

Step 5 · Enable & roll out

Training, documentation, and support until people are comfortable with the solution and adopt it.

At Best Buy · supply chain

I recorded training videos, wrote job aids, and held live training sessions on national DC network calls, then ran bi-weekly office hours after go-live.

At Solid · applied AI

I ran training sessions, built a public documentation library, and supported the customer hands-on through their production push.

Lesson learned: Adoption takes support after launch, so I plan for it from the start.

Step 6 · Handoff and feedback

Give the result a clear owner, and turn what users learned into what gets built next.

At Best Buy · supply chain

After testing, I handed ownership of the yard report to the field, so field leaders run it and are accountable for the number themselves.

At Solid · applied AI

I turn what I see in customer work into feedback and specs for Product and R&D, covering model-building usability, benchmarking workflows, and observability.

Skills and tools

Product & AI adoption

  • Technical product management
  • Roadmaps
  • AI change management
  • Stakeholder alignment
  • Success metrics & KPIs

Agentic systems

  • Semantic modeling
  • Agentic workflows
  • MCP integrations
  • Evaluation & benchmarking
  • Pilot-to-production delivery

Engineering & tools

  • Python
  • SQL
  • REST APIs
  • EDI
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • CrewAI
  • Langflow
  • Copilot Studio
  • Workato
  • Power Automate
  • Cursor
  • Claude
  • OpenAI
  • Streamlit
  • Power BI

Operations & analytics

  • Supply chain transformation
  • TMS / WMS / ERP
  • Cross-functional leadership
  • UAT & change management
  • Lean Six Sigma (Green Belt)
  • Tableau

Let's talk

Building a product, applied AI, or architecture team?

I'm always glad to share ideas and talk with teams working on enterprise AI adoption. Email me or connect on LinkedIn.

Need help with AI in your organization?

Through Tactical Adaptability Group, I run workshops and hands-on consulting for small and medium-sized businesses, nonprofits, and public organizations, on-site in Southwest Oregon or remotely anywhere.

Work at Solid is described with customer names withheld; links go only to public assets. Based in North Bend, Oregon.