Deputy Chief AI Officer

New_Nystec•Albany, NY

16h

About The Position

The Deputy Chief AI officer is responsible for leading NYSTEC’s enterprise AI portfolio and advancing the organization’s ability to responsibly adopt, build, govern, and commercialize artificial intelligence capabilities. This role will serve as the operating leader for NYSTEC’s AI investment model, ensuring AI work is organized, prioritized, governed, and measured across three investment lanes: Workforce Productivity AI, Vendor-Embedded AI, and AI Use Case & Offering Enablement. The Deputy Chief AI Officer will report to the CTO and work closely with IT, Security, Legal, Finance, BD, Service Delivery, Strategy, HR, and business leaders to ensure AI investments create measurable value while maintaining NYSTEC’s standards for security, ethics, compliance, and client trust.

Requirements

Demonstrated experience leading AI, automation, analytics, digital transformation, or emerging technology initiatives.
Strong understanding of generative AI, large language models, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, AI-enabled workflows, and enterprise AI adoption patterns.
Experience translating business problems into technology-enabled solutions.
Experience with portfolio management, governance, prioritization, business case development, and value measurement.
Experience working with cross-functional stakeholders, including technology, security, legal, finance, operations, and business leaders.
Strong understanding of cloud platforms, modern collaboration tools, SaaS platforms, data governance, and enterprise integration concepts.
Strong written, verbal, facilitation, and executive communication skills.
Ability to lead through influence in a matrixed environment.
Ability to balance innovation, risk, security, compliance, cost, and business value.
Understands NYSTEC’s mission, brand mindsets, and core values and can put the behaviors into practice.
Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Data Science, Business Administration, Public Administration, Engineering, or related field and 10+ years of progressive experience in technology, digital transformation, product management, consulting, data, enterprise architecture, innovation, or related disciplines.
An equivalent combination of education, training, and professional experience will be considered.

Nice To Haves

Experience in public sector, healthcare, regulated environments, nonprofit consulting, or government contracting.
Experience developing client-facing technology offerings, accelerators, or reusable service models.
Experience with Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure OpenAI, Copilot Studio, Power Platform, Microsoft Fabric, OpenAI/ChatGPT Enterprise, or similar platforms.
Experience with data platforms, vector search, knowledge management, RAG architectures, workflow automation, or AI-enabled application development.
Experience with ITIL, COBIT, PMO governance, enterprise architecture, product management, or agile delivery.
Familiarity with responsible AI frameworks, data privacy, cybersecurity, compliance, and AI vendor risk.
Experience building adoption programs, training, enablement playbooks, or communities of practice.
Consulting experience, especially in solution development, proposal support, client advisory, or productized service offerings.

Responsibilities

Lead the Enterprise AI Portfolio: Own and maintain NYSTEC’s enterprise AI portfolio across the AI investment lanes. Establish a single intake, classification, scoring, and prioritization process for AI ideas and initiatives. Partner with the PMO to ensure AI initiatives are visible, tracked, sized, sequenced, and governed. Maintain an AI portfolio dashboard showing active pilots, vendor evaluations, internal use cases, client offerings, risks, costs, benefits, and decisions. Recommend which AI initiatives should be scaled, piloted, deferred, consolidated, or stopped. Ensure AI investments align with NYSTEC’s strategic goals, operational maturity, financial model, security posture, and client-service mission.
Drive Workforce Productivity AI: Lead the strategy for enterprise use of tools such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, ChatGPT, Copilot Studio, Teams AI features, and other approved AI productivity platforms. Develop role-based AI adoption patterns for executives, consultants, project managers, analysts, finance, legal, HR, IT, and service delivery teams. Create prompt libraries, training programs, playbooks, office hours, and adoption campaigns. Partner with HR, Learning, Service Delivery, and Communications to build AI literacy across the organization. Measure adoption, productivity gains, employee experience improvements, and reduction in repetitive work. Ensure responsible use policies are clear, practical, and consistently communicated.
Govern Vendor-Embedded AI: Establish an AI SaaS readiness gate for vendor-provided AI features and add-ons. Evaluate AI modules in existing or proposed systems, including ERP, legal, HR, CRM, BI, service management, project management, and finance platforms. Partner with Procurement, Legal, Security, IT, and business owners to evaluate: Data usage and model training terms, Security and privacy controls, Permission inheritance, Auditability, Vendor lock-in, Cost and licensing impact, Business value, Support model, Integration complexity. Prevent AI tool sprawl by determining whether vendor AI capabilities duplicate existing enterprise platforms. Recommend whether to approve, pilot, renegotiate, defer, or reject vendor AI capabilities.
Lead AI Use Case & Offering Enablement: Build a structured AI use case development pipeline from idea to discovery, prototype, pilot, scale, reuse, or retirement. This pipeline should integrate with the Service Delivery Technology Investment process where applicable. Help business sponsors and Service Delivery leaders define problems in measurable terms before selecting technology. Assess use cases for value, feasibility, data readiness, risk, platform fit, ownership, operating model, reusability, and potential applicability to internal operations or client delivery. Coordinate with IT, Security, Data/BI, PMO, Service Delivery, and business teams to prototype AI-enabled workflows, applications, agents, and accelerators. Ensure each use case has a named business sponsor, product owner, success metric, data owner, and human-in-the-loop model. Support development of internal AI accelerators, including knowledge assistants, RFP response tools, contract analysis workflows, service desk assistants, onboarding tools, and project delivery accelerators. Where Service Delivery identifies client needs, support practice leaders in evaluating whether internal AI successes, reusable patterns, or accelerators can be adapted into client-facing offerings. Support proposal development, client demos, proof-of-concept design, and AI solution roadmaps when requested by Service Delivery. Coordinate with Legal, Security, Finance, Strategy, and Service Delivery to ensure AI-enabled offerings are compliant, scalable, supportable, financially viable, and aligned with NYSTEC’s mission, public-sector context, nonprofit positioning, and trusted-advisor brand. Identify opportunities for NYSTEC-owned intellectual property, reusable frameworks, accelerators, and AI-enabled service models, in coordination with Service Delivery and the appropriate governance process. Ensure reusable patterns, components, prompts, architectures, and lessons learned are captured for future use.
Establish Responsible AI Governance: Develop and maintain NYSTEC’s responsible AI governance model. Define AI decision rights, intake thresholds, approval paths, risk tiers, and escalation rules. Partner with the CISO and Legal to establish standards for: Data classification, Client data handling, Confidential information, Regulated data, Model usage, Human oversight, Auditability, Bias and fairness considerations, Output validation, Vendor terms, Incident response. Ensure governance enables innovation without creating unnecessary friction. Establish lightweight policies, templates, and review processes appropriate to NYSTEC’s size, mission, and risk profile. Maintain an inventory of approved AI tools, restricted use cases, and prohibited uses.
Partner Across the Organization: Serve as liaison between IT, Security, PMO, Service Delivery, Finance, Legal, HR, Strategy, and business teams. Facilitate an AI Portfolio Council or similar governance forum. Work with Service Delivery to identify AI opportunities that improve consultant productivity, proposal quality, client outcomes, and delivery efficiency. Work with Finance to measure ROI, cost avoidance, revenue enablement, and resource impact. Work with Security to design safe experimentation environments, sandbox controls, and responsible access models. Work with PMO to ensure AI projects follow appropriate intake, prioritization, governance, and reporting disciplines. Work with Communications and HR to support change management, training, and adoption. Perform other duties as assigned. Demonstrate the NYSTEC Core Values and Behaviors.