POSITION SUMMARY:
The Director, AI Automation is an onsite, business-facing leadership role responsible for building and leading WAI's enterprise AI automation capability. The role owns the use-case pipeline, prioritization process, workflow redesign standards, adoption approach, value measurement, and governance cadence for AI-enabled automation across business functions.
This role leads the business side of a business-led, IT-governed operating model. The Director partners closely with functional leaders, IT, data and security stakeholders, AI platform resources, offshore engineers, vendors, and business users to deliver practical AI-enabled workflows that improve productivity, quality, speed, decision-making, customer experience, and employee experience while maintaining appropriate human review, controls, and accountability.
ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Lead WAI's AI automation program, including use-case intake, prioritization, roadmap development, governance routines, adoption planning, and ROI tracking.
- Partner with leaders across Finance, Customer Service, Supply Chain, Sales Support, Operations, HR, Product/Catalog, Shared Services, and other functions to identify high-value AI and automation opportunities.
- Create and maintain a repeatable operating model for AI automation, including intake templates, value/feasibility scoring, process readiness criteria, solution design standards, testing expectations, rollout plans, and benefit measurement.
- Lead discovery workshops, process reviews, and current-state/future-state workflow design sessions with business teams and process owners.
- Prioritize opportunities based on business value, feasibility, risk, data readiness, change impact, scalability, and alignment with company priorities.
- Coordinate with IT leadership and technical AI resources on architecture, data access, security, integration, production readiness, monitoring, and support requirements.
- Define business requirements, acceptance criteria, controls, approval steps, escalation paths, and human-in-the-loop expectations for approved automations.
- Oversee business-facing AI Automation Engineers, project contributors, vendors, and remote technical resources to ensure delivery is timely, practical, documented, and aligned with business needs.
- Facilitate an AI governance or review forum that evaluates use cases, monitors risk and ROI, removes duplication, and sequences work across departments.
- Support AI literacy, power-user enablement, training, change management, and adoption activities so business teams can identify, use, and sustain AI-enabled workflows responsibly.
- Track adoption, performance, quality, productivity impact, cost avoidance, service improvement, and realized ROI for deployed solutions.
- Stay current on AI automation, agentic AI, enterprise workflow platforms, human-in-the-loop design, governance practices, and market practices relevant to WAI.
- Undertakes additional responsibilities and tasks as directed by management.
