AAA Life Delivers Timely, Trusted Insights to Protect Policyholder Financial Wellbeing

The Customer

AAA Life Insurance Company provides life insurance, accident, and annuity products to over 1.6 million policyholders across the United States. As a subsidiary of the American Automobile Association (AAA), the company is focused on delivering financial security and peace of mind with a strong reputation for service and trust.

Josh Bickmeyer manages the Analytics Engineering team at AAA Life, which is responsible for transforming and modeling data to serve business intelligence, machine learning, data science, and operational use cases across virtually every enterprise function. A sister function, the Data Engineering team, uses Airflow to ingest all data sources into AWS Redshift, a cloud data warehouse that serves as the single source of truth for the company. Their work forms the upstream foundation for Josh’s team, which focuses on analytics. As Josh puts it, “Airflow is the glue” that connects data ingestion, transformation, and delivery across the organization.

The Challenge

AAA Life’s business leaders rely on critical daily reports to steer decision-making and support policyholders. Before moving to Astro, analytics workflows were handled with GitHub Actions. As Josh explains, “GitHub Actions is great for CI/CD, but we outgrew it. There was no robust logging, alerting, or ability to visualize our dbt jobs. Debugging was painful, and we were often forced to rerun entire pipelines from scratch.”

Hitting SLAs wasn’t optional. If critical dbt jobs failed or ran late, business teams were left in the dark. Reports didn’t go out on time, metrics were outdated, and stakeholders lost confidence in the data. With growing data volumes and a lean team, Josh needed a way to run dbt jobs more reliably and efficiently.

The Solution

When AAA Life’s analytics team set out to replace GitHub Actions, they were looking for an orchestration solution that gave them better visibility and control — the kind of granularity that not only made debugging easier, but made the whole system more reliable and manageable. As an SQL- and Python-savvy team, they also needed a tool that could be easily adopted and managed without deep infrastructure expertise.

The team evaluated Dagster, but ultimately chose Astro, built on top of Airflow, which the team recognized as an industry standard with a large user base and mature ecosystem. Airflow and Astro together gave the team confidence to move fast without added risk.

“The learning curve with Astro was so much lower thanks to the Airflow community and lots of educational resources. Dagster felt like a newer tool with less support and slower onboarding.” Josh Bickmeyer Manager, Analytics Engineering

Eliminating the need for infrastructure expertise

With Astro’s managed infrastructure, Josh’s Analytics Engineering team can stay focused on their core mission — building trusted data products and delivering insights the business depends on — without relying on additional technical support. Astro provides the team the visibility, control, and flexibility they need. Features like comprehensive logging, alerting, and visual DAG monitoring make debugging faster and SLAs more consistently achievable.

Previously, with GitHub Actions, the team could only see a day’s worth of logs, making it hard to diagnose recurring issues. Astro stores extensive execution history, which has been critical for debugging and resolving production issues faster.

“Astro is just more robust than alternative solutions. The ability to log, monitor, and trigger jobs flexibly gave us everything we needed — and because Astronomer has made Astro so easy to use as a cloud service, it was very easy for us to set up and get it running. Our team can manage it just fine — and we’re not even that technical.” Josh Bickmeyer Manager, Analytics Engineering

Cosmos unlocks fine-grained visibility into dbt jobs

AAA Life also embraced Cosmos, Astronomer’s open-source library for integrating dbt with Airflow. By using Cosmos to dynamically generate Airflow tasks from dbt manifests, the team gained granular visibility and control over every model across their DAGs. For Josh and his team, this level of visibility was a game-changer. It removed the guesswork from debugging and gave them confidence they could meet strict SLAs, even in the face of failures. The ability to orchestrate dbt jobs at a more atomic level using Cosmos allows the team to restart workflows from the exact point of failure instead of rerunning the entire job, reducing recovery time by 80% and keeping daily reports on schedule.

“Since adopting Astro with Cosmos, we’ve rescued countless failed dbt jobs and still met our SLAs. That wasn’t possible before. The ability to see our dbt jobs at a more atomic level using Cosmos is game changing for us.” Josh Bickmeyer Manager, Analytics Engineering

The Results

With Astro, AAA Life now orchestrates dozens of production DAGs — including dbt transformations, reverse ETL jobs to their CRM system, and S3 exports for downstream partners. The analytics team can now independently own automation and orchestration without relying on data engineering or infrastructure support.

The impact on data freshness and stakeholder satisfaction is clear: daily SLAs are being met consistently, debugging is faster thanks to Cosmos and historical logs, and stakeholders across the company can trust the dashboards they depend on and confidently support policyholders with timely information.

“Executives look at our dashboards first thing every morning. With Astro, the data is fresh, reliable, and delivered on time. The biggest impact that I’ve seen personally is us being able to recover from failure much quicker, and that has had a significant impact on us being able to meet our SLAs.” Josh Bickmeyer Manager, Analytics Engineering

Airflow’s flexibility has also opened the door to cross-functional collaboration. As the analytics team has grown more confident, they’ve stepped in to support automation requests that used to sit with data engineering — delivering value faster to the business.

“Astro gives our team more flexibility. Before, only the data engineering team could handle orchestration. Now, we can automate and support a broader range of projects ourselves.” Josh Bickmeyer Manager, Analytics Engineering

What’s Next

Inspired by Astronomer’s own Ask Astro chatbot, Josh’s team is now exploring the use of Airflow to power internal LLM workflows that summarize policyholder support conversations and surface trends to proactively improve the customer experience.

“We’re excited to explore AI use cases like internal documentation chatbots and summarizing trends from customer call transcripts. Astro will be the engine behind these capabilities.” Josh Bickmeyer Manager, Analytics Engineering

AAA Life is continuing to scale its use of Astro across more use cases — helping the analytics team stay nimble, productive, and reliable as both data volumes and business expectations continue to rise. As they expand their data platform, AAA Life remains focused on safeguarding their policyholders’ financial wellbeing with every insight delivered and process automated.