Director, AI Strategy and Operations - Corporate Services (CSU)

Responsibilities

• Owns the AI strategy and roadmap for Corporate Services — defining where intelligence creates the most value across Legal, Finance, HR, Marketing, and IT workflows, sequencing how McKinstry gets there, and ensuring AI investments build on the enterprise foundation rather than proliferating disconnected tools.
• Owns the AI use case pipeline for CSU: intake, evaluation, prioritization, and the GO/NO-GO decision; ensuring the contract review pilot, CBA orchestrator, AP invoice processing, HR screening, and FP&A early warning initiatives move from active experimentation into governed delivery without accumulating in a backlog.
• Builds the AI team's own operating model as the proof case for CSU, bringing our own team's operations to a standard worth copying, maintaining the single source of truth for the team's decisions, metrics and documents and developing that operating model into the template the role then takes to the other Corporate Services functions.
• Runs the business review and performance measurement cycle. Prepares and runs the Monthly and Quarterly Business Reviews (MBRs and QBRs), runs the OKR cycle and measures the KPIs and captures the underlying detail so the numbers are defined, current and traceable. Maintains the settled-decisions record and the single open-items tracker and drives every commitment to a named owner and close date.
• Personally leads high-priority AI pilots end-to-end including the Contract/SOW review automation pilot as the anchor; from scoping and stakeholder alignment through execution, measurement, and the decision to scale or stop, owning outcome metrics for every pilot in the portfolio.
• Builds and runs the AI champion network within CSU to include recruiting, developing, and connecting legal counsel, finance analysts, HR business partners, and IT leads who beta test tools, give real feedback, and drive peer adoption across functions.
• Works directly with CSU function heads to identify where AI creates the most value in their workflows, co-designs solutions that fit how professional teams actually operate, and manages the particular change management challenge of gaining adoption among skeptical, risk-conscious professional audiences.
• Represents CSU Priorities in McKinstry’s AI governance forums, coordinates with the enterprise hub to stay aligned on foundation work and escalates when a decision requires executive authority; including decisions about data access, confidentiality, and responsible AI guardrails for Legal and HR use cases.

Qualifications

• 10+ years working in corporate operations, shared services, legal operations, finance operations or HR operations
• Preference of partnerships with at least two corporate functions to understand where the manual work is and why it persists.
• Bachelor’s degree in related fields. Relevant experience may be substituted for a degree.
• Demonstrated experience leading a digital, automation, or AI initiative inside a corporate function as the person accountable for whether it worked.
• Comfortable with the particular change management challenge of corporate professional audiences: lawyers, finance analysts, and HR business partners are risk-conscious, skeptical of tools that touch their work, and require a different adoption approach than field operations teams.
• Able to translate clearly between corporate function workflows and technology: can explain a document processing pipeline constraint to a legal counsel and a contract review problem to an AI engineer with equal clarity.
• Track record building adoption for tools in environments where resistance is professional, articulate, and legitimate — understands that responsible AI guardrails and transparent design are prerequisites for Legal and HR adoption, not obstacles to it.
• Strong written communication: can write a one-page use case evaluation for a function head, a pilot scope document an AI engineer can build from, and an executive update that doesn't require editing.
• Working familiarity with the responsible AI considerations specific to corporate function use cases: citation requirements for legal outputs, bias risk in HR screening, data classification for financial AI, and confidentiality for any use case touching sensitive corporate data.
• Proven ability to manage cross-functional stakeholders across business units, technology functions, and external partners in a matrixed organization.
• Proven ability to manage cross-functional stakeholders across field operations, technology functions, and external service partners in a matrixed organization.

Benefits

PeopleFirst Benefits: Competitive pay, 401(k) with employer match and profit-sharing plan, Paid time off and holidays, Comprehensive medical, prescription, dental, and vision with low or zero deductible options and low out of pocket maximums, Family formation benefits, including adoption and IVF assistance, Up to 16 weeks paid parental leave, Transgender inclusive benefits, Commuter benefits, Pet insurance, “Building Good” paid community service time, Learning and advancement opportunities via McKinstry University.

The McKinstry group of companies are equal opportunity employers. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and qualified applicants without regard to sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, race, color, creed, marital status, national origin, disability, veteran status, genetic information or any other basis protected by law. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment including, but not limited to employment, advancement, assignment, and training.

This commitment to Equal Employment Opportunity is made equally as a social responsibility and as an economic and business necessity.

Mckinstry is a drug-free workplace. Employment is contingent upon successfully passing a pre-employment drug and alcohol test, complying with the requirements of the Immigration Reform and Control Act and a Confidentiality Agreement, in addition to successful outcomes of background and reference checks.