Principal AI Business Partner

E Source is a research, data/analytics, and technology-focused professional services firm dedicated exclusively to the utility industry in the US and Canada. We help utilities target and serve their customers more effectively, enhance and optimize their grid, and leverage operating best practices and technologies to manage their business. Headquartered in Texas, we have 450+ employees across the US and Canada.

About the role

As a Principal AI Business Partner, you'll help E Source evolve from a technology-enabled services business into an AI-enabled solutions company, using AI to differentiate what we offer clients and to strengthen how we operate internally. This is a senior, hands-on role that blends AI product management, AI engineering, and internal evangelism. You'll partner with functional leaders across the company to find where AI can meaningfully improve our work, build and ship solutions yourself, and help create an AI-first culture where employees actively capture improvements to quality, efficiency, and business results.

This role is ideal for a senior technologist who has led teams and also built hands-on, with deep AI expertise and a genuine passion for teaching others to use it well.

Responsibilities

• Partner with functional leaders and teams to explore business processes, pain points, and quality challenges, identifying opportunities to deploy AI.
• Quantify business cases for AI opportunities based on productivity gains, quality improvements, risk reduction, or cycle-time savings, and prioritize based on effort, complexity, and readiness.
• Manage the full product lifecycle of internal AI solutions, from business case and hypothesis through proof of concept, implementation, growth, and maturity.
• Track AI adoption, usage, outcomes, and business impact metrics, and communicate results through demos, presentations, and training sessions.
• Design and implement practical AI solutions, including enterprise copilots, custom agents, retrieval-augmented knowledge assistants, agent orchestration, and workflow automation.
• Evaluate business challenges to determine the most appropriate AI approach, whether that's a chat interface, an AI assistant, an agent studio platform, or workflow automation.
• Develop rapid prototypes and proof-of-concepts to validate value before scaling a solution.
• Collaborate with software engineering, data, IT, security, compliance, and product teams to build enterprise-grade solutions, ensuring they align with security, governance, privacy, and responsible AI standards.
• Maintain strong working knowledge of the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem, including frontier models, enterprise AI platforms, and AI-assisted development environments.
• Coach employees and leaders on effective AI usage, prompt strategies, solution design, and safe experimentation.
• Teach teams to build effective prompts, AI agents, automations, and lightweight internal tools, and establish reusable templates, playbooks, and governance patterns.
• Conduct training sessions, office hours, workshops, and hands-on build sessions, and develop AI champions and power-user communities across the business.
• Help teams transition from centralized AI support toward self-service AI capability.

Qualifications

• Background in computer science, engineering, or an equivalent field.
• 10+ years of experience in internal consulting, business analysis, product management, business systems, process improvement, technology enablement, or a related discipline.
• Hands-on experience architecting and delivering AI solutions, including large language models (LLMs), AI agents and agent orchestration, autonomous workflows, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures, and fine-tuning.
• Experience building AI assistants, custom agents, automations, dashboards, or other productivity solutions.
• Business acumen in process analysis, operational improvement, value realization, and stakeholder management, ideally including experience with Lean or Lean Six Sigma methodologies.

Skills

• A senior technologist who's comfortable moving between hands-on building and leading others.
• A genuine passion for teaching and evangelizing emerging technology to upskill a workforce.
• Strong communication and facilitation skills with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Strong stakeholder management and coaching skills.
• Ability to translate ambiguous business problems into practical, technology-enabled solutions.
• Experience with Microsoft Copilot, Copilot Studio, Azure AI, Claude, GitHub Copilot, Databricks AI, or similar platforms.
• Experience with low-code/no-code automation platforms and modern application development workflows.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development methodologies such as vibe coding and loop engineering.
• Strong understanding of enterprise change management, user adoption, and value realization.

Benefits

• Excellent insurance options, including medical, dental, and vision plans.
• Company-paid life insurance.
• Company-paid long- and short-term disability insurance.
• Medical and dependent-care flexible spending plans.
• Paid parental leave.
• Flexible time off (FTO) policy.
• 401(k) plan with a 3% employer match.

Pay

The budgeted salary for this position is $175,000-$200,000 USD plus an annual bonus. Actual pay will be adjusted based on experience.

Schedule

This role is remote, with occasional travel around 1-4 times a year.