Reporting to: Head of AI / Innovation & AI Lab

We are seeking a senior AI product leader with 10–15+ years of experience in AI or digital product environments, ideally with domain exposure in FMCG, Manufacturing, Food & Beverage, or large enterprise customer-facing businesses.

The candidate will have ownership of AI portfolios—not just individual products—and a proven ability to industrialise AI initiatives from PoC through Pilot, MVP, and BAU, delivering measurable value with controlled costs and executive-ready decisioning. They will demonstrate strong enterprise governance capabilities across standards, risk, ethics, and security, experience building and defending business cases and trade-offs at the executive level, and the confidence to act as the single accountable owner across strategy, governance, delivery, and partner management.

Mission:

Lead AI portfolio strategy, governance, and value realisation to convert AI ideas into industrialised, measurable, and scalable products.

Responsibilities

• Portfolio Strategy & Prioritisation: Define problem statements, adoption plans, KPIs, and operating models; manage trade-offs across value, risk, feasibility, time-to-market, and cost.
• Governance & Operating Model: Own Innovation Board mechanics, gate criteria, templates, scorecards, and enforce definition-of-done standards.
• Stakeholder Leadership: Align with CDAO LT, Enterprise Architecture, business sponsors; own executive-ready decision packs.
• Vendor & Partner Shaping: Translate roadmap into outcome-based requirements, ensure delivery aligns with industrialisation standards, define joint success measures.
• Adoption, Ethics, & Community Flywheel: Enable enterprise adoption, establish ethics guidance, and measure usage for roadmap decisions.

Key Outcomes

• Portfolio Roadmap & Value: 12–18 month roadmap with dependencies, ROI-based prioritisation, and operating model clarity per product.
• Innovation Board as Product Factory: Clear charter, RACI, cadence, scorecards, and data-backed gate decisions.
• Service Catalog & Standardisation: AI Lab services with SLAs, artifact requirements, and adoption metrics.
• Value Realisation: Quarterly reviews for BAU products, with measurable KPI movement and optimisation backlog.
• Governance & Risk Management: Enforceable PoC → Pilot → MVP → GA standards, security, telemetry, and operational handover.
• FinOps & Cost Control: Cross-charging, GPU/compute strategy, and proactive budget management.
• Government Co-funding Success: Structured reporting, demo days, audit-ready evidence, and stakeholder engagement.

Required Skills & Competencies

• 10–15+ years in AI/digital product leadership
• Portfolio ownership with proven ability to industrialise AI initiatives (PoC → Pilot → MVP → BAU)
• Enterprise governance and operational readiness (risk, ethics, security, service catalog thinking)
• Strong executive communication, business case development, and trade-off management
• Commercial & partner-shaping fluency, FinOps mindset (cost to serve, GPU/compute trade-offs)
• Experience with government-funded innovation programs

Key Interfaces

AI Lab, Enterprise Architecture, Platform & Security, Finance/FinOps, R&D & Marketing leadership, vendors, government co-funding stakeholders, ecosystem partners (universities/startups).

What this role is not

• Delivery-only Product Owner
• PMO/program manager
• Procurement lead