AI Strategist

AJAIA•New York, NY

15h•$100,000 - $175,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Ajaia is hiring an AI Strategist to run the ground-level work on client engagements owned by a Senior AI Strategist. You will spend your week inside a client's operations: interviewing managers and frontline staff, mapping how work actually happens, and pulling the baseline numbers a recommendation gets built on. The senior strategist on your engagement owns the room with the CEO and carries the final call. You own the audit underneath it, and you will be in the room when it counts. This is a learning seat with real stakes. You will contribute directly to the triage, the diagram, and the client deck, and you will be expected to defend your findings when a senior strategist or a client pushes back on them. The role is a stated path to Senior AI Strategist.

Requirements

Zero to three years in a role involving real business judgment: management consulting, strategy, operations, product, or a comparable analytical or client-adjacent seat. Strong new graduates with the right instincts are welcome here.
Some exposure to client-facing or stakeholder-facing work, even if you were not the one holding the final recommendation.
Comfort using AI tools for real work, and a track record of checking rather than trusting the output.
The ability to take a messy, contradictory set of inputs and start imposing structure on it, even without full context.
Strong written and verbal communication. You can write up findings clearly and defend them out loud.
Willingness to work on-site in New York and travel to client sites as engagements require.

Nice To Haves

Exposure to a regulated industry such as healthcare, financial services, insurance, legal, or education.
Experience with process mapping or documenting how a business actually runs.
Working familiarity with workflow automation tools such as n8n, Zapier, or Make, and enough SQL or Python literacy to inspect data yourself.
Prior internship or early-career time inside a consulting, strategy, or venture-backed operating environment.

Responsibilities

Support a Senior AI Strategist across one or more client engagements, from discovery through delivery.
Run discovery interviews with managers and frontline staff, under the senior strategist's direction. Document how the work actually happens, not how the org chart says it happens.
Pull and validate baseline data. Get real numbers before anyone claims an improvement.
Contribute to the opportunity triage: surface what you're seeing, tag it honestly, and be ready to defend or drop it under questioning.
Build the current-state workflow diagrams that anchor the engagement's recommendation.
Draft sections of the client deck and the engineering build specification for the senior strategist's review.
Flag where the right answer is a process fix, not an AI build, even when that is not the answer the client wants.
Sit in on C-suite presentations and board meetings as part of the engagement team, building toward leading those conversations yourself.
Take structured feedback from senior strategists and apply it visibly engagement to engagement.