Douglas
Wessel
I founded and lead co-innovation engineering at viax, a team of 8 delivering AI-driven revenue execution to Fortune 500 enterprises. I designed the agentic product that team ships. I still write the code.
I build the team,
and the product.
I'm based in the Hudson Valley area of New York — married with two kids, running a gym, and building software. My career started in engineering management and supply chain and took me deep into the SAP ecosystem. I was brought into viax when it signed its first enterprise customers, to create the customer success and co-innovation engineering function. There was no such function before me. I grew it from three engineers to eight, across devops, frontend and backend.
I design agentic systems on the Claude Agent SDK, deploy Model Context Protocol across customer environments, and prototype the products myself before handing them to product development. I set the architectural direction my team builds against, and I still write the code that proves it works.
I co-own and operate Hudson Valley Powerlifting, a community-driven strength gym. Running a physical business teaches you things software never will: showing up, building real relationships, and solving problems you can't just redeploy. I built the SMS chatbot that answers members' questions, too.
Agentic systems,
in production.
From intent to governed execution
I conceived and designed the agentic system that turns customer intent into governed platform configuration, end to end. It is now a growth driver for the business.
That is real adoption of the system, not adoption of a process.
The problem came from doing two jobs at once. Pre-sales needed credible demos fast. Delivery needed implementations to go faster. Both bottlenecks had the same cause: turning stated intent into working configuration was slow, bespoke, and dependent on scarce expert time.
I designed the agentic framework, the sub-agent decomposition, the skills layer that encodes domain knowledge, the MCP tool integration through which agents act on the platform, pluggable model support so model choice is configuration rather than a rewrite, and an inspector that shows what agents did and why.
From engineering
to enterprise to AI.
A career built on curiosity — starting in supply chain engineering, mastering enterprise SAP implementations, and evolving into engineering leadership and agentic AI in production.
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2022 — PresentHead of Co-Innovation Engineeringviax
Brought in when viax signed its first enterprise customers to create the customer success and co-innovation engineering function. Grew it from three engineers to eight across devops, frontend and backend, supporting Boston Scientific, Solventum, Wiley, 2U, AutoTrust, Cintas and Colgate-Palmolive.
Conceived and designed the agentic system the team ships, cutting demo build from weeks to hours and enterprise implementation cycles from one to two years down to four to six months. Set the architectural direction for the platform's agentic layer. Covering the sales engineer function since April 2026, running pre-sales and post-sales in parallel. Lead the cross-customer Co-Innovation Council.
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2021 — 2022Solution Architect — Warehousing & DistributionStrykerScoped, designed and supported a greenfield SAP S/4HANA implementation with a focus on Supply Chain best practices for the medical devices industry.
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2021SAP Commerce Solution ArchitectTechmates Group (TMG.io)Owned SAP Commerce (hybris) solution architecture across the Whirlpool.com, KitchenAid.com and Maytag.com estate.
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2018 — 2020SAP Commerce Team LeadTechmates Group (TMG.io)Delivered a fully integrated D2C eCommerce platform across Whirlpool.com, KitchenAid.com and Maytag.com — a $350M multi-brand digital platform built across 6 offshore teams and 50+ resources, leading development and QA teams of 20+ engineers on a SAFe sprint cadence. Pioneered direct-to-consumer for major appliances including home delivery and installation, a first for Whirlpool Corp. Conceived and implemented a fully asynchronous order management solution that kept sales running through SAP ECC outages with zero downtime. Enabled subscriptions, bundling, financing, digital wallet payments and self-service returns, contributing to 75% year-over-year revenue growth.
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2015 — 2018SAP MM Lead & EWM Functional ConsultantBob's Discount FurnitureFunctional lead on the SAP EWM implementation across three regional warehouses and thirty local distribution centers supporting national home delivery, engaged as an independent consultant. Owned production support, enhancement and an SAP ECC IS-Retail upgrade across MM, IM and LE.
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2012 — 2015Retail & AFS Sr. Business Process ConsultantSAP AGResolved post go-live issues for retail customers across MM, SD and LE. Redesigned purchasing, inbound logistics and yard management for international container and domestic truckload operations.
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2008 — 2012Co-op Student & ABAP DeveloperMovado Group / Colgate-PalmoliveInterned through the Stevens Cooperative Education program, implementing SAP AFS ECC 6.0 at Movado Group and developing as an ABAP programmer at Colgate-Palmolive. Built a foundation in enterprise systems while earning an engineering degree.
Where the money
actually is.
Enterprise ERP runs finance, supply chain, procurement, pricing and order management. It is where large organizations concentrate capital, and it is the system of record every other initiative eventually reconciles against.
The barrier to modernizing it is not technical. It is credibility. ERP organizations are staffed by people who have survived failed transformations and have good reasons to distrust a new paradigm arriving without scar tissue.
I have been inside that stack for 18 years. I started implementing SAP and writing ABAP inside Fortune 500 programs, then spent three years at SAP itself, then led functionally, then architected greenfield S/4HANA. I can make the modernization argument in their language, and I have made it repeatedly with agentic tooling as the vehicle.