The first point is to distinguish between two separate issues: purchasing conventional insurance because of need, and working in a business that sells or administers conventional insurance.

Regarding conventional commercial insurance, the International Islamic Fiqh Academy distinguishes it from cooperative/takāful insurance and has maintained the permissibility of cooperative insurance as the Sharīʿah-compliant alternative. AMJA likewise states that the basic ruling on conventional commercial insurance is prohibition because of excessive gharar and other prohibited contractual elements.

However, necessity and compelling need are important exceptions. In the United States, where liability insurance is legally required to drive, AMJA explicitly permits the minimum insurance required by law. It has also recognized broader coverage when genuinely required, for example, because of a lease or financing arrangement, or when an actual compelling need reaches the relevant Sharʿī threshold.

Therefore, a Muslim purchasing legally required auto insurance is not treated the same as someone voluntarily entering an unnecessary conventional insurance contract where no need exists.

Your employment, however, requires a different analysis.

AAA is not, according to the description you have given, an organization whose only activity is conventional insurance. It has substantial independent activities that are permissible in themselves: roadside assistance, towing, battery services, travel-related services, membership benefits, and similar operations. The presence of an insurance division therefore does not automatically render every salary paid by AAA unlawful.

The crucial question is what your Data Science work actually supports.

Allah says:

“And cooperate in righteousness and piety, but do not cooperate in sin and transgression.”
(Qur’an 5:2)

If your data science responsibilities relate primarily to roadside assistance, membership retention, towing operations, battery services, customer experience, traffic or operational analytics, travel services, or general corporate infrastructure that is not specifically facilitating prohibited insurance contracts, then there is a strong basis for considering your employment permissible.

This is materially different from being an insurance underwriter, actuary pricing conventional policies, claims analyst, insurance salesperson, or data scientist whose models directly optimize the sale, pricing, underwriting, profitability, or targeting of conventional insurance products.

AMJA’s published answers illustrate this distinction, although its fatwas on the subject are not entirely uniform. It has taken a strict position regarding employment in a company whose core business itself is commercial insurance, including some IT and support positions. At the same time, other AMJA answers recognize some allowance for auxiliary work that does not directly participate in insurance transactions, particularly where there is need, while advising movement to cleaner employment when reasonably possible.

Your case is stronger than the case of an employee working for a pure insurance company, because AAA itself has significant permissible lines of business.

The principle concerning mixed businesses is also relevant. Contemporary jurists distinguish between a company whose principal activity is permissible but which has some impermissible transactions, and a company whose very core business is prohibited. AMJA has recognized this distinction in discussing employment involving mixed permissible and impermissible activities.

For your situation, I would therefore divide the work into three categories.

First, if you work exclusively or overwhelmingly on permissible AAA operations, for example, roadside services, membership, towing, batteries, customer service, operational efficiency, or general non-insurance analytics, your work is permissible, in shā’ Allāh. The fact that your employer separately earns revenue from conventional insurance does not make your salary automatically unlawful.

Second, if you sometimes work with company-wide datasets that incidentally contain insurance information, but your work is not designed to create, sell, price, recommend, or administer insurance contracts, this would ordinarily fall into a mixed or indirect area rather than direct participation in the prohibited transaction. I would not advise treating the entire salary as haram merely because insurance data occasionally appears within broader enterprise analytics.

Third, if your assignment specifically involves building models such as insurance pricing algorithms, underwriting risk scores, customer propensity models designed to sell insurance, optimizing premiums, increasing insurance-policy conversion, predicting insurance profitability, or directly supporting conventional insurance product strategy, this becomes much more problematic. Such work directly assists the insurance transaction rather than merely serving the larger organization.

Accordingly, the most appropriate boundaries for you moving forward would be to try, as reasonably possible, to remain on the membership, roadside, operational, travel, or general technology side of AAA. If your manager allows you to choose projects, preference should be given to projects unrelated to insurance products.

If you are occasionally given an insurance-related project, distinguish between merely maintaining shared infrastructure and directly facilitating the insurance business. A generic data platform, cybersecurity system, HR analytics model, or infrastructure service is considerably more remote than developing an underwriting or insurance-sales model.

If your current position already focuses primarily on the insurance division, particularly on pricing, underwriting, claims profitability, sales, or marketing of policies, then I would advise you to seek an internal transfer to AAA’s permissible business lines or, if that cannot reasonably be arranged, begin looking for another role. This does not necessarily mean that you must resign immediately without alternative employment, especially if doing so would cause genuine hardship. The transition should be responsible and proportional to one’s circumstances.

There is also no basis, from the information provided, to say that you must abandon a beneficial data-science career merely because your current employer has a mixed business model. The goal should instead be to distance your own work from direct involvement in the problematic transactions.

The Office of Imam of IAR would therefore advise as follows: if your Data Scientist role is primarily connected to AAA’s roadside assistance, membership services, operational analytics, or other permissible functions, your employment and salary are permissible, in shā’ Allāh. If your work directly develops, promotes, prices, underwrites, or optimizes conventional insurance products, you should seek reassignment away from those responsibilities. If the work is genuinely mixed and occasional indirect exposure cannot reasonably be avoided, this does not necessarily make the entire employment unlawful, but you should continue working toward minimizing that involvement.