AI Strategy & Transformation Manager
About The Position
Watlow is hiring a newly created, highly consultative individual-contributor role to shape how AI is used across the enterprise and ensure that existing AI use delivers measurable business value. The manager will partner with executive and functional leaders to understand business goals and develop practical AI initiatives across manufacturing operations, procurement, quality, engineering, sales, and other functions. The role is enterprise-wide and global, spanning the United States, Mexico, Europe, and Asia, and works alongside internal technical teams and global delivery centers. It reports to the Vice President of IT and includes periodic domestic and international travel.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in business, engineering, information systems, or a related field.
- At least 7 years of experience in digital or business transformation, technology consulting, product strategy, or a related role.
- Proven experience partnering with and influencing executive and senior stakeholders.
- Hands-on experience applying large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot, to business problems.
- Experience designing or delivering retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or enterprise knowledge solutions.
- Strong communication and presentation skills, from the shop floor to the executive level.
- Willingness to travel up to 20% domestically and internationally.
- Authorization to work in the United States without current or future sponsorship.
Nice To Haves
- Big 4 or technology consulting experience, especially in a digital, AI, or transformation practice.
- Experience in discrete manufacturing; continuous manufacturing, such as oil and gas, is also considered.
- Experience with sales transformation, including opportunity management and opportunity-to-project-to-execution processes.
- Familiarity with product taxonomy or product data management.
- Exposure to engineering or new product development processes.
- Experience applying AI or process improvement in procurement, quality, or manufacturing operations.
- Experience working in global, multi-region organizations.
- Experience working with offshore or global delivery teams.
- MBA or another advanced degree.
Responsibilities
- Partner with leadership teams to understand business priorities and identify high-value AI opportunities.
- Assess business processes, products, and operations for opportunities to reduce operating and manufacturing costs, improve efficiency, and support growth, with an initial focus on operations.
- Build AI adoption roadmaps and business cases, and help leaders prioritize initiatives based on value and feasibility.
- Lead discovery workshops to define problems, explore use cases, and align stakeholders on next steps.
- Translate business challenges into clear requirements and work with internal technical teams to develop practical solutions.
- Set priorities for global delivery centers without directly managing those teams.
- Integrate existing AI tools into everyday work to help teams get more value from them, rather than adding new tools.
- Drive training, use case development, and change management to support effective AI adoption across functions.
- Provide practical advice to leaders on implementation requirements, risks, barriers, and realistic timelines.
- Bring industry best practices to Watlow and share learnings across regions and business units.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Manager
