AI at Brinks Home: Lower costs, better customer support

Veronica Moturi’s whole philosophy of customer service fits in one sentence, and she said it before we ever got to the AI.

“I’m a big advocate of: customer experience starts with your employees. So no matter how good the company product is, no matter how good the marketing is, at the end of the day, when you’re in security, it’s the person on the other end of the phone that kind of has your family and your house in their hand.”

Veronica Moturi, at 4:14

Veronica is the senior vice president and chief customer officer of Brinks Home, the Dallas home security and alarm monitoring company with more than a million customers across North America (Brinks Home). When Sasha and I talked with her she was senior vice president of customer experience, and her org already covered “anything that’s customer-facing outside of sales”: technicians, frontline agents, retention and chat. Brinks Home’s own bio says she began her career as a customer service phone agent, joined the company in 2012 and now runs a team “committed to the shared goal of fostering a best-in-class customer experience.” Security Systems News put her on its 40 Under 40 list, and Industry Tech Outlook named her one of its 10 Most Admired Women Leaders of 2024 (Brinks Home). In March 2025, Women We Admire named her one of the Top 50 Women Leaders of Dallas (LinkedIn).

We recorded this in mid-2025, a few months before her 13-year mark at Brinks Home, and it aired on October 7, 2025. Where we sit, so you can weigh what follows: YSecurity helps companies secure the AI they put in front of their customers, so I listen to a rollout like this one for what the agent can reach, what it keeps and how it proves who’s calling. Veronica’s numbers are labeled as hers, and the public record sits beside them. I opened with the description I’d give anyone who asked what Brinks Home does.

“Good old-fashioned, let’s secure a physical layer.”

Jon McLachlan, at 0:10

“Yes, yes,” she said. “Mostly residential and small and medium business.” Then she told us how a call center agent ends up running the whole customer side of a security company.

From a phone agent to chief customer officer

Sasha asked how long she’d been with Brinks. “So I will hit my 13-year mark in September. I have been in the industry for about sixteen years now.” She started where a lot of security careers quietly start, answering the phone, and she was good at it from the first day.

“It was very easy for me to work in the call center back then and easily kind of stand out from a metric perspective, because it came second nature.”

Veronica Moturi, at 0:43

Her LinkedIn fills in the shape. Her first job in the industry was customer service at ADT Security Services from February 2010, taking more than 80 inbound calls a day, and from May 2011 she was an operations supervisor at Devcon Security, over the cancellation department (LinkedIn). The tape tells you how each step happened, and it’s mostly one director who noticed her. He came up to her desk, pulled her into his office and asked what she wanted to do. She said accounting, because “I’ve always enjoyed math,” and because she had a plan: “I want to be rich and an executive when I’m thirty.” She laughed about it with us. “Well, fast forward, I will never do accounting.”

When that director moved to “another startup security company,” she followed him as his admin. Within about six months, the reports she was bringing him, on “why certain KPIs aren’t being met,” turned into a new job: “I’m going to go have you work in this other department and manage these people and go help me fix this issue.” That was her first team. When he moved again, to the company that’s now Brinks Home, she followed him a second time, and he had a specific problem for her.

“And he was like, look, we need somebody that can handle this complaint department and take our Better Business Bureau rating to an A plus. And I already had an established relationship with the Better Business Bureau.”

Veronica Moturi, at 2:22

“So I started as a manager here, managing a team of about 15 people that handled complaints, and got the Better Business rating back up to an A.” Her LinkedIn has her starting in September 2012 as manager of the executive response team in Irving, Texas, handling escalations from the Better Business Bureau, state attorneys general and social media, then consumer affairs and relocations, then customer retention as a director from 2017 and a vice president from 2019, and senior vice president of customer experience from September 2022 (LinkedIn). In December 2025 she became chief customer officer.

She describes the rest as compounding trust: “year after year, I’ve been given more and more responsibility, which has now propelled me to basically be over all of our customers, whether it’s technicians, frontline agents, our retention strategy, chat, you name it.” The complaints desk turns out to be a good place to learn a business. You see every way it fails a customer, in writing, with a regulator copied.

Which Brinks is Brinks Home?

One line from her story needs a footnote, because it confuses almost everyone, including the AI assistants people ask. Her mentor, she said, “worked at the original Brink’s for probably close to 15 years at that point.” There are two companies behind the name.

The original is The Brink’s Company, founded by Perry Brink in 1859 and best known for armored transport. It started selling home security alarm systems in 1982, spun the home business off in 2008, and that business renamed itself Broadview Security in 2009 and was sold to Tyco, then ADT’s owner, for $2 billion in 2010, adding Broadview’s 1.3 million customer accounts to ADT (Wikipedia).

Brinks Home is the other one. It’s Monitronics International, founded in Dallas in 1994 to monitor alarms for customers and dealers, bought by Ascent Media in December 2010, the buyer of the do-it-yourself company LiveWatch for $67 million in 2015, and since a 2018 trademark license with Brink’s, the company that sells security under the Brinks Home name (Wikipedia). So the short answer is that Brinks Home licenses the Brink’s name, and the company behind it is Monitronics, with its headquarters in Dallas.

That history matters to the rest of the conversation in one specific way. The brand’s whole promise is a person who answers when something goes wrong, and most of what Veronica describes is how to keep that promise at a lower cost per call.

Customer experience starts with your employees

Sasha set up the central question of the episode: “And we know that trust is super important for a security company. Why is customer experience also very important for a security company?” Veronica’s answer, quoted at the top of this page, flips the usual org chart. The experience isn’t a department, it’s the sum of the people taking the calls.

“So when you think of trust and you think of customer experience, it all boils down to the frontline agent and the agents that are working at the company that really drive the best experience. People think it’s the opposite, right? Customer experience is the customers. You know, it’s a product of what the employees actually provide to the customers.”

Veronica Moturi, at 4:14

I heard it as a scaling argument. “It’s the extension, because that’s what it means to scale, really,” I said. You take the experience, the idea and what the brand represents, and you push it through every touch point between the company and its customers. The employees are the pipe it goes through.

She has kept saying it since. In an October 2026 profile, CX Current quoted her version: “Your customers are at the root of your foundation, but the employees come first” (CX Current). CMSWire’s July 2026 interview with her ran under the headline “The Chick-fil-A of Home Security” (CMSWire), and CX Current spells out the comparison she uses: Chick-fil-A and McDonald’s both sell chicken and fries, and the experience is what customers remember.

One first impression, and that’s it

Security raises the stakes on every one of those touch points, because most customers only call when something has gone wrong.

“Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely because we’re a security company, right? You have one first impression, and that’s it. And so each critical touch point that goes throughout that customer journey, our company has to be aligned on what’s most important, but then our actions also have to do that.”

Veronica Moturi, at 5:44

Then she gave us the order of operations she runs her organization by, and it’s the clearest statement of priorities I’ve heard from a customer experience leader.

“So our foundation is very much set by, it’s employees first, then it’s customers, and then it’s your pillars of whatever you’re trying to drive and scale: revenue, cost, attrition, what have you. But your foundation is set first on your employees and your customers second.”

Veronica Moturi, at 5:44

“No, I love that,” I said, and I meant the security version of it too. In our world the employees are also the first line of defense. The agent who can tell a real customer from someone pretending to be one is doing security work, whatever their title says.

A better experience at a lower cost to serve

I asked her for a moment that surprised her, one where she wondered how they’d recover and came out proud of the team. She answered with the program she’s been running for four years.

“Yeah. So Brinks has been going through a transformation for four years now. And the transformation has been: how do we continue to evolve with technology, leveraging any kind, like AI, efficiency-gain technology, things to make people better, smarter, et cetera?”

Veronica Moturi, at 7:10

The goal has a name inside the company, and it’s the trade-off every support leader lives with, stated as a refusal to make it.

“And all of that focus has become the Brinks culture of what we’re, our North Star, is how do we increase our customer experience but lower our cost to serve. Everything’s unit economics, everything’s about doing the right thing. We can easily make customer experience great but blow out the budget. And vice versa, you can easily lower cost and make it really crappy customer experience. But we have been very deliberate as a leadership team to say that’s too easy.”

Veronica Moturi, at 7:10

“If we want to do it, we have to do it right. It’s by balancing both.” The newest piece of it, in the year before we talked, was AI, and it landed on her desk as a very concrete assignment: “how do I create a virtual assistant that is equivalent to the experience that my frontline agents are, to help improve our experience and lower our cost?” The technology turned out to be the easy part. The hard part was the people it was meant to help.

“Well, if you think about that, a frontline agent does not understand what that truly means outside of, oh, it’s going to take my job. And so that has been probably the biggest hurdle, is, I’ve got over 300 frontline agents, have 40-plus leaders that are managing people day in and day out.”

Veronica Moturi, at 7:10

You’re either on board or you’re out

Sasha asked the question every leader in her position has to answer: “And how do you communicate that message?” Her answer was two words, and then a blunt explanation of why.

“Very transparently. You’re either on board or you’re out, right? You have got to figure out how to have AI become your best friend versus your enemy, because that’s where you become replaceable.”

Veronica Moturi, at 9:09

It sounds harsh in a pull quote and kind on the tape. Her point is that the threat isn’t the tool, it’s refusing it: “There’s people out there that are more than happy to embrace technology and do the job we’re doing today.” And she draws a clear line on what transparency means: “Doesn’t mean I tell all the details of what I get in the boardroom down to the frontline agents.” It means she’s “the voice for the overall umbrella,” and her leaders repeat the message.

Sasha put the payoff in one sentence: “And LLMs have this excellent talent of sifting through a big volume of data and figuring out what is actually important.” The public record shows how she ran the rollout. CX Current reports that Brinks Home’s launch of AI agent assist opened with a video from Veronica telling the floor plainly that the company was adopting it, and that she took the jobs question first instead of waiting for it. Her answer there: “But it hasn’t taken anyone’s job” (CX Current). Sasha wrote about the same choice, adopting AI without the drama, in The Art and Zen of Adopting AI.

I grew up in a Brinks home

This one is personal for me, and I told her so.

“I grew up in a Brinks home. So I’m very familiar with Brinks as the brand, and we had the little keypad on the door next to the garage. And it always felt very safe, and I always appreciated it.”

Jon McLachlan, at 10:25

A neighbor would come over, forget the system was armed and open the door, and the thing would go off. “And then you get the call. [It’s] always a human being. There was no such thing as like automated phone systems back then.” It was always a friendly conversation, someone making sure everything was okay. That memory is the bar for the AI, and it’s the reason I don’t think the technology takes the human out of it. I said it on the tape: “I don’t see this stuff taking anyone’s jobs. Like, it will make people faster.” Veronica corrected me, in the best way.

Not only faster, more accurate

“Not only faster, but it makes you more accurate, because then you can pull all that data together and make a distinct decision without trying to funnel through multiple screens to decipher what to do. So accuracy is probably the biggest benefit.”

Veronica Moturi, at 11:52

Her explanation of why that matters to a security customer is the best plain-language case for AI in an alarm business I’ve heard. The point isn’t automation for its own sake. It’s “giving it to a human to make a more sound decision than reacting in the moment.” She used my front door as the example: “Well, what if I knew that you were home? Right? There’s cell phones, there’s cameras, there’s all this technology of verifying certain things before you actually act.” The act she means is the expensive one, “dispatching police or the like.” CMSWire reports that Brinks Home’s separate alarm response team handles roughly 180 alarm events a minute and dispatches police and medical help directly (CMSWire). At that volume, a better decision on each one is the whole game.

The multiple screens are a real number, too. She told CMSWire the team consolidated agent tools from 12 systems down to two, and CX Current reports that a new hire once trained on 14 applications before taking a call, work that now runs in one view of the customer relationship system (CMSWire, CX Current).

Consent is number one

Sasha took the next step, to the data itself. Agents and AI working together means customers sharing “a lot of sensitive information with the company,” Sasha said, and in a home that can mean video, audio and “analytics about the behavior of people that are part of that safety net.” How do you keep earning trust with that? Her answer starts with consent, before any technology.

“I think first, you have to be very upfront and transparent on exactly what information you’re pulling in and using internally. That’s the customer’s proprietary information. Their consent, as we go deeper and deeper into data and technology, is number one.”

Veronica Moturi, at 13:33

Then the security team: “Foundationally, you’ve got to have a really good cyber team and an IT team to secure that data, right?” She named the failure she’s designing against, information leaving “from an ex-employee or something like that,” and the controls against it, “your controls and security and your redundancies for that data and access points.” And then a third step most security conversations skip, making the data usable. “The term analysis paralysis, right, could be very easy as you continue to get more and more data trying to find an answer.” Her fix is classification and indexing, so the data “becomes something that’s intentional, that can take action.” Sasha agreed and added the AI angle: “this is where LLMs and SLMs do give you a lot of benefit in connecting the dots.”

The company’s own engineering write-up shows the same instincts built into the agent. Philip Kolterman, Brinks Home’s chief information officer, wrote that “security is job one,” that cyber and data security were embedded in the AI agent from the start, that every API endpoint is rigorously managed, and that the agent’s experience is “both deeply informed and anonymous.” She “never has or retains actual identification of the customer,” he wrote, and Brinks Home works only with providers that have passed thorough inspections (Cresta).

This is the part of an AI rollout we spend the most time on with clients, and her order is the right one. Write down what the agent sees and what it keeps before you argue about the model. Our AI data bill of materials is one way to do it, and call transcripts are exactly the kind of data our training data scrubbing work is built for.

Who had the insight

I wanted to know who inside Brinks first saw what AI could do for the customer experience. She gave the credit away three times.

“You know, our visionary, top visionary, I give big kudos to our CEO, William Niles. William Niles was our general counsel for, gosh, don’t quote me, but maybe 15 years before he became our CEO. He is big on technology. He embraces it.”

Veronica Moturi, at 15:34

Her 15 years holds up. Brinks Home’s bio for William Niles has him as executive vice president and general counsel of Ascent Media Group from January 2002 to the end of 2010, and in the same roles at Ascent Capital Group, Monitronics’ former parent, from September 2008 until he became Ascent’s chief executive in March 2018. He joined Brinks Home in September 2019 as a director and chief transformation officer before becoming chief executive (Brinks Home), and Wikipedia dates that to March 2020 (Wikipedia).

The second name was Philip Kolterman, “who is now our CIO,” hired “as our digital transformation leader.” She describes their partnership as a balance: “Sometimes he’s five years ahead of where I can even think of where to go,” and she grounds it in “what can we implement to start to see the needle move.” His bio says he joined in 2021 to digitalize the customer experience and credits his team with the security industry’s first voice digital agent, the launch of BHX and a cloud ERP system, which together grew self-service from 14 to 55 percent of transactions (Brinks Home). The third was her boss, Bob Reedy, the chief operating officer, “a great enabler,” who joined in February 2019 after operational transformation roles at CenturyLink and 19 years at Windstream (Brinks Home).

A partner called Cresta

“It sounds incredible,” I said, “and like there’s really strong alignment to move into the future and to do it together.” So did they build it in-house or buy it?

“We found an excellent partner that we started to work with a little over three years ago. Their name is Cresta, and they were big in agent assist through large language models. But we have continued to spin up new use cases, and time and time again, they prove out to work and become scalable.”

Veronica Moturi, at 17:07

Cresta’s own account puts the start in 2023, with agent assist guiding human agents through processes in real time (Cresta). The company was born at Stanford’s AI Lab in 2017, co-founded by Sebastian Thrun with Tim Shi and Zayd Enam, and its chief executive since 2023, Ping Wu, co-founded Google’s Contact Center AI (Cresta). That’s the background Veronica had in mind when she said “their leadership team came from Google.”

The first results are in Cresta’s customer story. Before Cresta, she told them, “We were very reactive. We were very old school,” with in-house agents and outsourced partners on different platforms. After the rollout, Cresta reports a 30-point increase in net promoter score, quality management costs cut in half, transfers down from 30 percent of calls to 8, and handle time down 8 percent, within six weeks of implementation. Her summary: “It’s night and day from where we were before” (Cresta).

Kolterman’s post adds the part vendor case studies usually leave out. Before going back to Cresta for the voice agent, Brinks Home tried a proof of concept on off-the-shelf contact center software and its own in-house ChatGPT setup, and ran into voice lag, model drift and trouble keeping a consistent personality (Cresta). The partner came after the experiment, not instead of it.

We named her Veronica

The agent Cresta helped build sits in the phone system itself, the interactive voice response menu every caller hits first, “to answer every single phone call.” I asked who answers. Her reply got the biggest laugh of the episode.

“Yeah, so we named her Veronica.”

Veronica Moturi, at 17:51

“Veronica. Okay,” Sasha said. “Just a random name,” she said. “Phil did that. Phil went out and, I feel like he did it on purpose just to play with me.”

It wasn’t random. Phil Kolterman’s own post says the team named the agent Veronica “in honor of Veronica Moturi,” that the shared name got confusing, and that the team took to calling the digital one Virty-Vee (Cresta). The human Veronica described what went into her namesake: “she feeds in a lot of our data of like processes and what we want to say, how we want to say it. You know, we worked on a personality, empathy, and active listening. Courtesy is very important in the security realm.”

In April 2025, Cresta published a video of William Niles putting the agent to the test by calling in as a customer. The description quotes his verdict on the launch, “12 out of 10,” and the video ends with a live demo with Veronica, the agent (YouTube). The player below opens at the demo.

My sensor’s not working

Before the details, a detour. “I’m super curious, does Brinks have a presence in Europe by chance?” I asked. “No, we don’t.” I offered her an out, “Not yet, is what you mean, right?” and she gave the actual footprint: “We just got back into Canada, but that’s it.” Cresta’s customer story describes customers in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, and by October 2026 CX Current lists the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico (Cresta, CX Current).

Then the question I really wanted answered. If I call the support line and get Veronica the agent, does she know what’s going on in my home? The answer is the clearest description of an AI first line I’ve heard from someone who runs one.

“Yeah, so like right now, one of the big use cases is troubleshooting. So you called from your phone number, we would know your caller ID, we would be able to connect it to your account. We do all of our verification to make sure it’s really you before we start to go into detail.”

Veronica Moturi, at 19:08

Then the agent does what a good human agent does, it looks before it asks.

“But she’s doing a really good job of identifying a trouble condition, knowing something’s low battery, not communicating, not recording, or the like. She pushes that information up in the conversation. So it’s like, my sensor’s not working. Oh, I see it’s a low battery. Let’s start the troubleshooting steps together.”

Veronica Moturi, at 19:08

Starting with troubleshooting was a deliberate choice, and an unusual one. Kolterman wrote that self-service normally begins with simple care and billing, and that his team started with technical support anyway, because “knowledge-intensive scenarios are actually a natural place to start” for large language models (Cresta). The people get the rest. “The amazing team of 350 folks that you have underneath you get to deal with more interesting, like more intricate problems that require maybe a little bit more creativity, a little bit more human connection,” I said, and she agreed: “Yep. Exactly.”

Cresta’s chief executive, Ping Wu, wrote in February 2025 that Brinks Home’s agents liked losing the mundane parts of the job, like authentication and summarizing calls, and that the AI agent hands calls off with full contextual summaries. One of the first customers to use it said it was “the best virtual assistant I’ve ever experienced” (Cresta). In that post Veronica describes the agent guiding customers “through complex, multi-step troubleshooting scenarios.”

The security sentence in her answer is the one about verification, “to make sure it’s really you before we start to go into detail.” A voice agent is a front door, and voices can now be cloned. Vijay Balasubramaniyan of Pindrop spent episode 57 on what attackers do to contact centers, and our post on why deepfake attacks keep working makes the case for proving the caller instead of judging the voice. Matching the caller ID to the account and verifying before any detail is the right order.

Governed on our side

I asked the build-or-buy question more precisely: “did they build on behalf of Brinks, and so now Brinks owns and has the rights to the software? Or did you jump on a platform that maybe already existed and was meant for this customer experience?” Her answer is a good model for anyone writing their first AI vendor contract.

“It’s a bespoke relationship of what we’re building. It is on their platform. It is leveraging, everything’s kind of governed on our side, and then we connect to their platform to create that experience. But they are kind of the brains behind creating and leveraging large language models with a virtual agent.”

Veronica Moturi, at 20:30

“I’m just a people leader and an executor over here,” she said, and Sasha wasn’t having it: “You’re not just a people leader.”

Kolterman’s post is the engineering side of “governed on our side.” The agent rests on three assets his team built over years: a rebuilt knowledge base, high-quality data and a fully API-enabled CRM. Giving the agent hands in those systems takes work, because “it requires real IT work to bridge the gap with APIs,” and the goal is for the agent to perform every call center function in the CRM through those APIs. Voice adds its own constraint, since “every millisecond counts.” His team tests the agent with automated regression tests, powered by large language models, that simulate and score voice calls, and he warns that managing an AI agent “demands the same level of precision and continuous quality assurance” as managing a person (Cresta).

That’s the shape we’d recommend, and the order matters. Knowledge first, then reading customer data, then one write action at a time, each through an API you can scope and log. We wrote the rungs out in Are You Actually Going to Give the Agent Write Access? and the reasoning behind them in why agents need least privilege more than humans ever did.

They want to see their dogs eating

Sasha asked about the long view: “What do you think will be the greatest challenge in the security space over the next five years?” “It’s a good one,” she said, and then she made the case against her own industry’s oldest product. What most of us grew up with “is the traditional: I have a sensor on something that’s opening and closing, I have a panel that tells me that it’s not working.” She’s watching the people coming next instead: “I am a huge advocate of following the generations that are coming into the marketplace.”

“I fundamentally feel that sensors, panels, those type of hardware type of things are not going to be the default of choice. It’s going to be home automation. It’s going to be the instant gratification of seeing things in your home.”

Veronica Moturi, at 21:15

She called them “the thumbers,” the people who “just constantly look at the shorts, what’s at their fingertips of knowledge today,” and she’s clear about what they’ll pay for.

“They don’t care about a sensor or a motion. They want to see their dogs eating. They want to see that their best friend’s at the front door. They want to see that their boyfriend opened the door, whatever. They want that connection of knowing who and what is happening now.”

Veronica Moturi, at 21:15

So the hurdle, in her words, is whether “the security industry start to taper off of more of the traditional type of setup and evolve into more of what the newer generation is looking for.” Brinks Home’s own marketing a year later reads like her answer. In August 2026 its National Dog Day post led with the camera, not the sensor.

The panel isn’t gone, though. It’s becoming the hub. A month earlier the company introduced a new one, sold on speed and features rather than on the sensor it listens to.

Veronica summed the episode up herself a week after it aired, resharing our clip on this exact point.

Painkiller or vitamin

Sasha connected it to the oldest problem in our industry: “security has been seen as an overhead by many companies, by many people.” The question is where the value shows up. Hers is video: “the value add to me goes deeper into cameras and camera monitoring,” and “the future could be more of video verification and video monitoring.” Today, she said, she’s “reliant on something happening physically in my home to get my phone to ring.” She’d rather pay someone to watch, and she made the case with the most relatable line of the episode.

“Time and time again, people that understand that security is important, they’ll pay for it. It’s top of the line, just like mine’s pest control. I don’t ever want to see a freaking roach in my house, right? So I pay for that. That’s on top of my list.”

Veronica Moturi, at 23:44

The risk is the customer trimming the budget who asks, “what am I actually paying for? Because nothing has happened to get me to understand the value add.” Her fix is to make the value visible: “And I think you could flip that with that video.” Sasha named the test every product has to pass.

“And to narrow it down, there’s a question of whether it’s a painkiller or a vitamin. The product that you have, does it solve a pain point? Or is it just one of those good to have?”

Sasha Sinkevich, at 25:06

Every security program has the same problem, and it’s a happy one: when it works, nothing happens. The fix is the one she described, show the work. For a home, that’s the camera. For a company, it’s the evidence you put in front of the board, which is what the security slide your board deck is missing is about. Brinks Home has been selling the visible version for a while, too.

Her proudest moment

I asked for her proudest day professionally. She didn’t pick a promotion of her own.

“So I have a leader that has been with me under my umbrella for almost 13 years, for about 12 of the 13 years. And she’s the longest one that has been under my leadership. And I recently just promoted her to vice president. And she started as an agent.”

Veronica Moturi, at 25:30

She did it again for a second leader, who’d been with her about four years and was promoted at the same time. “So just being able to give back what someone gave to me, I think, is my proudest moment.” It’s the director at her desk all over again, handed forward. “Like, your proudest moment is your ability to share those incredible moments with people who really stepped up to the plate and demonstrated their leadership,” I said. The agent-to-leader path is also a retention strategy, and the numbers say it works. She told CMSWire that career pathing, where every agent starts at the same level and can choose a track toward higher pay and more skills, is a big part of why annual turnover fell from 150 percent to 22 (CMSWire).

Leading leaders who are already there

The challenge she picked was a quieter one. Before she reported to the chief operating officer, she ran “the retention departments, which was about 100 employees,” and the complaints team she’d had since the start, and they had all grown up together. Now she was inheriting experienced leaders: “two new departments under my org two weeks ago, and one’s a VP and others are senior directors.”

“So that’s probably been the biggest hurdle of like, am I doing what I’m supposed to do as a senior leader to support somebody that’s already senior in their role?”

Veronica Moturi, at 27:05

“Their amount of experience in their role is sometimes equivalent to how old I am,” she said. The job changes from teaching tricks of the trade to finding where you add value: “being able to connect with them on a level to plug in certain expertise that I could provide, without looking at it as a net new employee that I need to grow and develop up to this certain level.” My answer was that asking the question is most of it: “even just considering them, you know, with those questions in mind, I think is the perfect start, right?”

Chess, not checkers

Then I asked her to meet her younger self, “an opportunity to meet little Veronica,” and offer some advice. The advice was about timing. “So earlier on, I had zero filter.” It built a reputation she’s kept, “Veronica tells it like it is type of thing,” but she’s learned that “there’s a time and a place, and there’s also kind of your political capital. You don’t have to fight every single battle.”

“What I use now is, it’s chess, not checkers. So we’re in the chess game, we’re not in the checkerboard game.”

Veronica Moturi, at 29:35

The context makes it land. “I was low twenties as a manager, working with people that were 50, 60 years old, and that was their career,” she said, and you can imagine what they thought of “the little whippersnapper that was coming in, thinking that she could change the world overnight.” Sasha pushed back on regret itself.

“Often, if you don’t make mistakes, it means you haven’t done enough.”

Sasha Sinkevich, at 31:15

She agreed, “That is true,” and turned it over: “And if I’m happy where I am now, could I have altered something? Probably. But maybe that would have made me too passive, right?” I admitted the trap in my own question. “That’s why it’s a two-stage question.” The answer to whether you could improve is always yes, but going back means changing who you are. “But I like who I am today.”

Robots, quantum and the camera doorbell

I asked her to look as far ahead as she liked. She started with the companies that changed her market.

“I think the question that always comes to mind, I mean, when SimpliSafe and Ring entered into the marketplace, they really changed the game, offering a DIY solution, self-monitored, offering, you know, what became very much standardized as the camera doorbell and creating that community.”

Veronica Moturi, at 32:55

SimpliSafe was founded in Boston in 2006 by Chad and Eleanor Laurans, and Ring started in 2013 as Doorbot, founded by Jamie Siminoff, with Amazon as its parent since 2018 (Wikipedia, Wikipedia). From there she went big: “things like enabling with quantum,” and “we could have little robots running around becoming our security providers.” Her bet is that “transportation will be the biggest thing that takes off first. But with transportation, I think what’s in your home comes next.” Any of it “could either transform this market, it could kill this market, or it could just be another service that’s provided in the traditional space,” and she compared it to phones: at first everybody who could afford one had one, then “if you didn’t have one, it’s like, are you just off the grid?”

I answered with the adoption curve, and with the book every founder knows. “Like you cross the chasm, and all of the entrepreneurs out there are familiar with that Crossing the Chasm book.” Geoffrey A. Moore published Crossing the Chasm in 1991 (Wikipedia). My take, from the tape, was that the camera doorbell and the monitored system answer different questions. A video tells you what happened, and I said bluntly of a doorbell on its own, “It’s not going to call the police.” Her point was the other half, and I think she’s right about it: the people buying now want the video too. The companies that pair a person who responds with the live view will own the next decade. “So it’ll be interesting over the next five to ten years what happens,” she said.

An intrapreneur inside a big company

“And I think, like, even the big, traditional, well-established companies will have a very important role to play in all of that going forward,” I said. Sasha took it to the people who make that happen.

“Agreed. And it’s important to have people like yourself who drive the innovation and make sure that the company adapts to the changes that will continue to happen.”

Sasha Sinkevich, at 36:45

“That can be sometimes the most challenging place for that to happen,” Sasha added, “inside of a big company where you have rules and you have established like guidelines and you have culture and you have precedents.” So I gave her the label I think fits. “And so, props to you for being an intrapreneur, of pushing out something new inside of a big organization like Brinks.” “Thank you,” she said.

What happened after the tape

The year after the episode reads like a confirmation of everything she told us. In December 2025 she became chief customer officer.

In February 2026, USA TODAY named Brinks Home to its America’s Best Customer Service list for the second year in a row, after the 2025 list in the consumer services industry (LinkedIn). Her post gave the credit to her leaders and frontline teams, and named the tools.

In July 2026 she sat down with CMSWire’s Beyond the Call, and the interview is the best public scorecard of the program she described to us (CMSWire). As she described the figures there, a virtual agent now answers every incoming call, and an automated quality tool reviews every call agents handle, rather than the small sample supervisors could check by hand. Average handle time isn’t one of her frontline measures, first call resolution is. Net promoter score went from negative to 55, and her goal is 90: “I want to compete with Apple and Tesla.” A universal agent model cut transfers to below 10 percent, self-service pushed billing from the second most common reason to call to the sixth, and the team works remotely around Dallas-Fort Worth. “We didn’t see any of our KPIs go backwards,” she said. CMSWire also reports that her agents use AI-assisted tools including Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot, and that the team has run predictive churn models for six years.

In October 2026, CX Current, Cresta’s publication, named her one of its Top 50 Leaders Transforming CX, in the category it calls The Trust Builders, and followed with a profile titled “Employees First” (CX Current).

The phrase I keep from this episode is her first one. Customer experience starts with your employees, and so does the AI. Brinks Home gave the agent a name, a personality and a narrow first job, told the people it was meant to help exactly what it was for, and kept the hard calls for humans. The agent is named for the leader who started on the phones, and that may be the most honest description of the program there is.

Did you catch it? A six-question quiz

Is your support line ready for an AI first line?

Veronica’s answers make a good checklist for anyone putting an AI agent on the phones. This scorecard asks eight questions about yours, from how it verifies a caller to who owns its quality after launch.

What does an AI first line give back?

Veronica’s measure of success is the calls her people get to spend on the harder problems. This calculator estimates the hours an AI first line hands back, with your own numbers.

From Brink’s Home Security to Virty-Vee

Everything on this page sits on one timeline, from the original Brink’s alarm business to an AI agent that answers the phone. Filter it by thread.

What to do this week

Five things, in the order Veronica’s story suggests.

1. Call your own support line as a customer. William Niles did. Listen for the moment it verifies you, and notice everything it tells you before it has.
2. Write down what your AI agent can see, keep and change. The knowledge base, the customer data, every API and which of them write. If a write action isn’t on the list, take it away until it is.
3. Put consent in plain language. Tell customers what you pull in and use before you go deeper into their data, and set an end date for call recordings and transcripts.
4. Tell your frontline team first. In plain words, from the top: what the agent will do, what it won’t, and what it means for their jobs. Then close the loop and ask them whether it’s actually helping.
5. Test the agent like a new hire, every release. Simulated calls for every change, a summary on every handoff, and once a quarter, someone outside your team trying to talk it into things it shouldn’t do.