US Commercial AI, Portfolio Lead

Pfizer • Collegeville, PA

5d • $214,900 - $358,100 • Hybrid

About The Position

As we accelerate the enterprise AI agenda and scale agentic AI across the Chief Marketing Office, the AIA Organization is seeking a Senior Director Commercial AI Portfolio Lead reporting to the VP of Transformation Lead, AIA. This role serves as the single accountable leader for AI portfolio governance, value realization, and operating excellence across AI Builds to support US Marketing, Field, Market Access & Patient Services. The role will enable a federated build model that enables approved citizen-developer teams to build agents within a centrally governed operating model led by the Commercial AI team. This leader will manage a team who will set the standards, decision rights, controls, shared registry, and planning routines required to ensure capabilities are sequenced effectively, reused where appropriate, and built in alignment with Legal & Compliance, privacy, responsible AI, security, data, and deployment expectations. This role and supporting team is responsible for partnering closely with the CIO to ensure the seamless connectivity between CIO approaches/standards and Commercial AI builds. The Senior Director and their direct reports will be responsible for architecting and operationalizing use case intake, governance and registry.

Requirements

• BA/BS with 12+ years of progressive experience leading cross-functional commercial, digital, technology, governance, and/or AI initiatives at scale (graduate degrees can substitute for experience).
• Demonstrated experience leading enterprise governance, portfolio, or Center of Excellence functions in complex, matrixed organizations.
• Track record of executive-level stakeholder engagement, influence, decision facilitation, and trade-off management across business, technology, data, legal, privacy, compliance, and security stakeholders.
• Experience defining operating models, standards, controls, and adoption pathways that enable distributed teams to build consistently within centrally governed frameworks.
• Experience leading and developing teams, including indirect / matrixed teams.
• Working knowledge of AI/ML frameworks, agentic AI patterns, APIs, permissions, data products, prompt design, evaluation, telemetry, deployment patterns, and the modern AI tooling landscape.
• Candidates must be authorized to be employed in the U.S. by any employer.
• This position requires permanent work authorization in the United States.

Nice To Haves

• Experience standing up enterprise-wide AI, technology, or agent governance functions or Centers of Excellence.
• Experience building and operating intake, portfolio, reporting, registry, or governance workflow platforms, particularly AI-powered ones.
• Hands-on familiarity with cloud AI platforms, modern AI agent frameworks, prompt/evaluation tooling, telemetry approaches, and production deployment requirements.
• Experience creating citizen-developer governance models, low-code / no-code enablement, federated build standards, or business-builder guardrails in a regulated environment.
• Proven ability to translate complex technical, data, risk, and governance concepts to senior business stakeholders.
• Strategic thinking and creative problem-solving in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
• Deep grounding in AI ethics, responsible AI, privacy, regulatory frameworks, and Legal & Compliance standards; regulated-industry experience strongly preferred.
• Candidate demonstrates a breadth of diverse leadership experiences and capabilities including: the ability to influence and collaborate with peers, develop and coach others, oversee and guide the work of other colleagues to achieve meaningful outcomes and create business impact.

Responsibilities

• Define the centrally governed build operating model for functional-area teams, including decision rights, intake criteria, approval pathways, documentation expectations, control points, escalation triggers, and handoff requirements in support of Commercial AI builds, and in line with CIO platform standards.
• Ensure all Commercial-area-built agents and AI-enabled workflows adhere to Legal & Compliance, privacy, responsible AI, security, data use, information protection, and model / prompt evaluation standards before deployment.
• Partner with CIO, Data, Legal, Privacy, Compliance, and Security teams to align build patterns, permissioning, data product usage, API access, telemetry capture, and production deployment requirements.
• Provide strategic guidance for incubation and exploration use cases across in-scope functions, eliminating redundancy and deduplicating assets across the organization.
• Serve as senior thought partner to the VP of Transformation Lead and the AIA leadership team on AI portfolio direction, capability gaps, build sequencing, shared dependencies, and incubation / exploration investment trade-offs.
• Drive cross-functional alignment with the Business, Finance, Legal, Privacy, Compliance, Technology, Data, and Security stakeholders to ensure consistent decision-making, resource optimization, and responsible scaling.
• Set infrastructure to understand AI direction across Commercial; enabling holistic strategic planning and decision making.
• Stand up a Commercial governance model and shared AI build registry to sequence dependencies, identify reuse opportunities, manage capacity constraints, and resolve cross-ATC trade-offs.
• Use the shared registry to maintain visibility into what is being built, by whom, for which business need, using which data products, APIs, permissions, evaluation methods, telemetry, and deployment path.
• Identify overlaps, conflicts, and platform dependencies early, and drive executive-level decisions that balance speed, business value, compliance standards, user experience, and enterprise reuse.
• Lead US Commercial AI Governance as the gold standard adopted enterprise-wide, with clear governance coverage for both centrally built and functionally built agentic AI capabilities.
• Chair the Commercial AI Council and orchestrate cross-functional decision-making at the executive level.
• Continuously evolve governance standards in partnership with Legal, Privacy and Compliance to balance speed of execution with risk management.
• Lead assessments of new AI platform capabilities and features, such as Claude Cowork, evaluating fit, risk, readiness, data implications, and adoption pathway for Commercial use.
• Partner with Compliance on these assessments to confirm new capabilities meet regulatory, privacy, responsible AI, and security standards before rollout.
• Partner with CIO Organization on the end-to-end design and delivery of the AI-powered Intake & Reporting Platform, replacing manual workflows with automated submission, evaluation, prioritization, governance routing, and stakeholder reporting.
• Integrate the shared AI build registry into intake and reporting workflows to provide real-time, organization-wide visibility into portfolio status, build ownership, value capture, reusable assets, dependencies, standards compliance, and available capabilities.
• Use the platform to surface investment recommendations, incubation candidates ready for Alpha elevation, reusable patterns, and pattern-of-use signals that inform next-wave Tier 1 capability identification.
• Design the prioritization framework that evaluates initiatives across business impact, technical feasibility, data readiness, resource requirements, compliance readiness, security posture, reuse potential, and strategic alignment.
• Define incubation and exploration metrics and value-tracking standards adopted across the portfolio.
• Define measurement expectations for functional-area-built agents, including value hypotheses, adoption measures, usage telemetry, quality / evaluation outcomes, risk indicators, and deployment readiness.
• Drive portfolio-level course corrections from performance data, ensuring AI investments compound business value across US Commercial and the CMO.
• Embed AI-first operating principles within the function, leveraging AI and automation to scale governance, intake, reporting, registry management, evaluation routines, stakeholder engagement, and executive decision support.
• Model AI-first as a leadership behavior others in the organization replicate, demonstrating measurable productivity and capability gains within the function.
• Direct Commercial and CMO colleagues to ensure governance, intake, build standards, town-planning routines, registry requirements, and value-tracking standards are embedded in process without slowing execution.
• Build, mentor, and lead a cross-functional team spanning portfolio management, governance, standards, and enablement, including effective indirect and matrixed leadership.
• Absorb and integrate portfolio and governance work from the newly incorporated Digital team, aligning processes and standards under one operating model.

Benefits

• 401(k) plan with Pfizer Matching Contributions and an additional Pfizer Retirement Savings Contribution
• paid vacation, holiday and personal days
• paid caregiver/parental and medical leave
• health benefits to include medical, prescription drug, dental and vision coverage
• Relocation assistance may be available based on business needs and/or eligibility.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior