AI Strategist

Tenex•New York, NY

18h•$150,000 - $180,000•Onsite

About The Position

Every week, an executive at one of our largest clients walks into a room with the same question. "We've spent millions on AI pilots. Why hasn't anything changed in how my team actually works?" The reason is almost never the model. It's the workflow. The pilots solved a demo, not a job. Nobody mapped how work actually happens. Nobody owned the rollout past launch. Nobody iterated when adoption stalled. That's what AI Strategists at Tenex are hired to fix. You own the engagement from the first executive conversation to the moment the workflow you built becomes the way the team runs. You partner with Forward-Deployed Engineers to ship the work, not just spec it. You sit with the CEO one hour and the warehouse manager the next, and you stay honest with both. Your scope shifts weekly because the technology shifts weekly. We expect you to live at the frontier of agentic AI as a daily practitioner, because your credibility with clients depends on it. The goal is simple to state and hard to hit: the clients we work with should become measurably more AI-native, measured by adoption of the workflows we ship and the business outcomes they drive. Nothing else really counts. This role reports to the Head of Strategy and works alongside Forward-Deployed Engineers, Solution Architects, and our partner teams at Anthropic, OpenAI, Vercel, and beyond. Plan on traveling to client sites about once a month.

Requirements

3 to 7 years at the intersection of strategy, operations, product, or workflow design, ideally in consulting, an AI-native company, or a fast-growth startup
A track record of redesigning a workflow or process, formally or informally. You can walk through exactly what you changed, why, and what happened as a result
Daily, hands-on use of the modern agentic AI stack (Claude, Cowork, ChatGPT, Cursor, Lovable, Zapier/n8n, and whatever ships next week). You're not just aware of these tools, you're building with them across multiple contexts every day
Strong discovery instincts. You know how to ask the questions that surface how work actually happens
Credible with executives and engineers in equal measure. You translate fuzzy client demands into actionable technical direction, and engineering jargon into clear "here's what that means for you" language back to the client
A bias to ship. You see a workflow three people are doing manually and you automate it before the next standup
High ownership, low ego, and a builder's instinct

Nice To Haves

Background as Chief of Staff, ops lead, PM at an AI-forward company, management consultant (McKinsey Digital, BCG X, Bain Vector), service designer (IDEO, Fjord), or founder
Published writing, public speaking, or other public artifacts of your point of view on applied AI

Responsibilities

Own the relationship at the C-suite level. You're the person the CEO calls when something matters, and the person who tells them the hard truth when the answer is uncomfortable
Run AI strategy audits that surface how work actually happens (not how people say it happens), quantify what's broken, and rank the bets worth making
Design and run sprints that move strategy, product, and technical decisions from quarters into weeks
Build the workflows alongside Forward-Deployed Engineers, hands-on, using off-the-shelf SaaS, low-code platforms, and frontier agentic tooling
Drive adoption past launch, because shipping a workflow nobody uses is the same as not shipping
Turn what you learn in the field into the playbooks the rest of the firm uses on the next engagement