Customer Success · Cybersecurity (CISSP) · Applied AI

The rare CSM who speaks security and AI.

I'm Mike Pace. For a decade I helped enterprise customers succeed with complex security technology — as an engineer, then as the person who turned adoption barriers into renewals. Now I'm pursuing my MS in AI and putting it to work every day.

Joseph (Mike) Pace
Open to AI-focused CSM roles
🎓 MS in AI · 2027

10+

Years in Customer Success & engineering

CISSP

+ Security+, CySA+, SSCP & CyberOps

MS in AI

Kennesaw State University · 2027

Enterprise

High-value security customers & partners

My story

From securing networks to scaling customer success — now powered by AI.

My career started deep in the technical trenches — standing up complex security deployments, supporting the behavioral-analytics platforms that detect advanced threats, and keeping mission-critical systems stable for some of the most demanding enterprise customers in the world.

But the work I loved most was never just the technology. It was the moment a customer went from struggling with a tool to trusting it to protect their business. That's what pulled me into Customer Success: turning adoption barriers into confident, renewing, thriving customers.

Since 2025 I've made a deliberate bet on what comes next: I stepped into my Master's in Artificial Intelligence full-tilt and rebuilt how I work around AI — researching, drafting, analyzing, and automating so I can spend more time on the human part of the job. It's been a season of sharpening, not sitting still. This portfolio is a window into that practice.

"The best customer success isn't about the product. It's about helping people realize the outcome they were promised — and AI lets me do that faster, and more thoughtfully, than ever."

AI in practice

How I put AI to work every day

These aren't hypotheticals — they're how I've spent the past year using AI to build and run real businesses: writing software, modeling finances, automating operations, and making sense of messy information. I'm happy to walk you through any of them.

🚗

Fleet Operations Software

I run a small Turo car-sharing fleet, and I built the software that runs it. It started as a single-file browser tool tracking one fleet's unit economics; today it's Curblane — a multi-tenant SaaS product, deployed and functional, with authentication, a tiered subscription model, per-vehicle profit-and-loss reporting, a parking break-even optimizer, and product analytics. It's in pre-launch with a founding-operator waitlist. Its core metric is realized daily rate against market benchmark, so an operator can see where revenue is actually leaking rather than just what a booking grossed.

Multi-tenant SaaSSupabase / PostgresSubscription pricingProduct analytics
See it live →
Fleet operations dashboard showing per-vehicle profit and loss
The original single-file ops tool I built — the dashboard that became Curblane (demo data shown).
⚙️

Automated Product Pipeline

My digital-products shop runs on an AI automation I designed: every week it researches trends, builds a batch of new spreadsheet products on a consistent design system, quality-checks the formulas, and writes the listings — a product line that largely runs itself.

Workflow automationDesign systemsExcel / Sheets
Spreadsheet product built on the shop's house design system
A spreadsheet product, auto-generated in the shop's house style.
📈

Data-Driven Vehicle Acquisition

I built AI models that pull live vehicle listings from multiple marketplaces and rank every purchase candidate by projected cash flow — turning a gut-feel buying decision into a data-backed one, with depreciation, financing, and utilization all modeled.

Data analysisPythonDecision modeling
🧮

Financial Modeling & Planning

I use AI to build the kind of analysis that used to require a consultant: multi-year P&L models with scenario sensitivity, unit economics, and a full growth plan — the financial backbone behind the businesses I run.

Financial modelingForecastingStrategy
🔎

Document Analysis & Timeline Reconstruction

I used AI to work through a large, unstructured set of records and correspondence spanning several years — extracting and cross-referencing facts, reconstructing a precise chronological timeline, surfacing inconsistencies, and producing a clear, verifiable evidence summary for a high-stakes review. A study in turning overwhelming information into a defensible narrative.

Document analysisTimeline reconstructionEvidence synthesis

AI-Native Ways of Working

AI is woven through my daily work — research, drafting, analysis, and automating busywork so I can focus on people and outcomes. Case in point: this portfolio and my résumé were built collaboratively with an AI agent, working from my real projects.

AI agentsPrompt designProductivity
Experience

A decade of turning customers into success stories

Founder & Applied-AI Builder
Sept 2025 – Present · Independent · MS, Artificial Intelligence (Kennesaw State, 2027 anticipated)

A deliberate pivot into AI. I designed, built, and deployed Curblane, a multi-tenant SaaS platform for vehicle-sharing fleet operators — authentication, a tiered subscription model, per-vehicle P&L, and product analytics — now in pre-launch with a founding-operator waitlist. Alongside it I operate a six-vehicle car-sharing fleet in Atlanta, handling the full guest lifecycle and carrying a collision claim from date of loss through independent inspection to funded settlement in two days. I also built the 24-month financial model that sets the acquisition criteria for every vehicle I add, and run an automated digital-products shop. Pursuing my MS in Artificial Intelligence in parallel.

Customer Success Manager · Cisco Systems
2021 – 2025 · Progressed across CSM, Success Program Manager & Customer Success Specialist through reorgs; Team Lead, High-Value Recovery

Helped build a 4-person High-Value Recovery team from the ground up — interviewing candidates and, each quarter, segmenting the Salesforce account base by renewal-risk criteria to target at-risk, unassigned customers. Renewal rates across those targeted accounts moved into the low 90s within six months and held. Authored the team's onboarding playbook and recovered stranded accounts — onboarding a brand-new admin at a major retailer through a dual-domain merger deployment in under two weeks, then securing training credits to make them self-sufficient. Served as enablement lead for the Cisco XDR launch, running train-the-trainer for 13 partner sellers across 3 strategic partners, and managed adoption, success plans, and QBRs across a scaled book of 72 accounts ($20K–$75K ARR).

Senior Technical Consulting Engineer · Cisco Systems
2015 – 2021

The dedicated 24/7 engineer trusted with the network-security-monitoring backbone of two of Cisco's most demanding accounts — a top-3 U.S. bank and a global asset manager — on Cisco Secure Network Analytics and Secure Cloud Analytics. When a performance crisis threatened a multi-year contract, I pushed for and helped lead an emergency cross-functional on-site and drove an overnight hotpatch into production, keeping the relationship intact. Delivered the white-glove support behind the bank's premium tier — knowledge-transfer sessions and overnight upgrade windows — and assisted the SE and technical architect on their multi-site hardware deployment (data migration, data load analysis for load balancing, and troubleshooting).

Technical Support Analyst · McKesson Provider Technologies
2013 – 2015

Troubleshot escalated application and networking issues, coordinated delivery of software fixes and customizations, and performed in-depth technical analysis of complex escalations.

What I bring

Skills & certifications

A blend of customer success leadership, deep technical fluency, and a growing command of applied AI.

Customer Success & Leadership

Customer SuccessAdoption Enablement Program ManagementGTM Strategy Stakeholder ManagementTeam Building Change ManagementCross-Functional Collaboration Customer ExperienceProcess Improvement

AI & Technical

Applied AI / LLMsRAG Prompt EngineeringMachine Learning Solution Deployment & IntegrationSIEM · XDR SalesforceNextGen Firewall Secure Network AnalyticsWireshark Kali LinuxVMware

Certifications

(ISC)² CISSP
CompTIA Security+
CompTIA CySA+
(ISC)² SSCP
Cisco CyberOps Associate (in progress)

Education

MS, Artificial Intelligence
Kennesaw State University · 2027 (anticipated)
BS, Computer Information Systems
Florida Institute of Technology · 2013
Let's talk

Looking for a CSM who speaks AI?

I'm actively exploring Customer Success roles at AI/ML, SaaS, and security-focused companies — places where the customer's outcome depends on getting complex technology to actually land. If that's the team you're building, let's talk.