Corporate Vice Pres, Dir, AI/Agentic Experience Strategy and UX Architecture - Consumer Journeys

New York Life•New York, NY

48d•Hybrid

About The Position

This role is the strategic facilitator behind how New York Life defines, structures, and governs AI and agentic experiences across the full consumer and client lifecycle, spanning consumers, prospects, applicants, policyholders/clients, and beneficiaries navigating claims and proceeds. It is a facilitation and consulting-oriented role that combines strategic framework development with collaboration on hands-on AI experience concept development, experimentation, and practice innovation. The Director operates as a trusted partner to a broad, matrixed set of stakeholders including product managers, designers, business operators, content teams, performance marketing, compliance partners, technology, and AI and data teams. The ideal candidate brings deep knowledge of how consumers and clients engage with life insurance, financial planning, retirement, and wealth management products and services across their lifecycle, combined with working fluency across AI and agentic technology domains, and a track record of moving beyond advisory work into hands-on concept development and experimentation.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Business, Finance, Product Management, Human-Computer Interaction, or a related field; Master’s degree preferred.
10+ years in product strategy, experience strategy, management consulting, or strategic facilitation in complex, matrixed organizations.
Demonstrated expertise in life insurance, financial planning, retirement, or wealth management through direct consumer- or client-facing experience, product or strategy roles within a carrier, bank, or broker-dealer, or consulting work serving these domains.
Proven track record developing and operationalizing strategic frameworks and facilitating cross-functional workshops and alignment processes.
Direct experience engaging with AI or data teams on product feasibility, capability tradeoffs, and responsible AI considerations.
Track record of hands-on AI experience concept development, experimentation, or prototyping in partnership with design and technology teams.
Experience partnering with compliance or legal teams to translate regulatory requirements into consumer-facing experience or product guidance in an insurance or financial services context.
Deep financial services domain knowledge across life insurance, financial planning, retirement income, and wealth management, including consumer and client journey dynamics, product complexity, and relevant regulatory and consumer protection context.
Working fluency across AI and agentic technology domains, including generative AI, agentic systems, conversational AI, predictive models, and AI risk concepts, sufficient for credible technical partnership and capability evaluation.
Hands-on fluency with AI tools and platforms sufficient to develop AI experience concepts, conduct AI behavior evaluations, and build strategy artifacts using AI.
Exceptional strategic facilitation, framework development, and workshop design skills; able to structure ambiguous problems and drive groups to clear, actionable conclusions.
Ability to envision and articulate future-state AI experience models, not just optimize current-state experiences with AI capabilities.
Strong communication skills with demonstrated ability to tailor messaging across executive, business, and working-level audiences.
Comfortable operating in ambiguity with a bias toward structure, pragmatic progress, and healthy skepticism toward hype.

Nice To Haves

Experience developing novel strategy artifacts or practice methodologies for emerging technology domains where established playbooks do not yet exist.
Stay current on AI adoption patterns in consumer financial services and insurance, bringing relevant competitive and market insight into strategic decisions.
Exposure to omnichannel experience strategy, including digital self-service, contact center AI, agent-assisted models, and AI-mediated discovery.

Responsibilities

Facilitate and steward the AI and agentic experience strategy for consumer, client, and beneficiary personas, establishing consistency and cohesion for where and how AI should play a role across the full lifecycle, from awareness and consideration through application, onboarding, in-force servicing, and claims.
Synthesize leadership vision and consumer and client insights through top-down and bottom-up engagement into coherent, durable, and scalable frameworks.
Distinguish where experiences should be AI-enabled versus AI-native, and define appropriate human-AI collaboration models anchored in the realities of consumer trust, financial literacy variability, and the regulatory constraints of insurance and financial services.
Develop a clear point of view on where AI accelerates consumer and client engagement and self-service, where human judgment and support remain essential, and how NYL’s human-led advice and guidance model is maintained as a differentiator across digital and non-digital channels.
Facilitate future-state experience visioning for consumer and client journeys that reimagines the lifecycle in an AI-native context, defining what fundamentally different AI-first experience models look like in addition to incrementally inserting AI into existing flows.
Contribute to hands-on AI experience concept development in partnership with Consumer/Client business leaders and Experience Design, including AI behavior concept (what should this AI do, when, why, for whom) while collaborating with design partners on prototyping and testing.
Design and facilitate AI experience experiment collaborations for consumer and client contexts, defining hypotheses, structuring tests, and evaluating outcomes to build organizational evidence for which AI experience models work and why.
Document and conduct analyses of current-state consumer and client journeys, AI touchpoints, and workflows, and partner with Experience Design and Consumer/Client business leadership to define future-state AI-enabled experiences integrated into broader journey strategy.
Identify where AI creates opportunities to introduce new experience moments that don’t exist today and where it collapses or streamlines traditional journey stages.
Pioneer new strategy and experience artifact types for consumer AI experiences that go beyond traditional experience deliverables, such as AI behavior maps for consumer conversational interfaces, confidence and disclosure models for consumer-facing AI, and AI experience scorecards for evaluating consumer AI quality.
Build and use AI-powered tools to accelerate strategy work, including simulating consumer experience scenarios, stress-testing AI experience designs, and rapidly iterating on strategic artifacts.
Apply deep knowledge of how consumers and clients engage with products, financial planning, retirement planning, and wealth management across the product lifecycle to identify where AI creates genuine value versus where it introduces risk, erodes trust, or creates compliance exposure.
Understand the end-to-end consumer and client journey, from awareness and needs recognition through product selection, application, underwriting, policy delivery, in-force servicing, and beneficiary claims, and map AI opportunity and risk across each stage.
Bring informed perspective on the regulatory and compliance landscape governing consumer-facing insurance and financial services experiences, including advertising, disclosure, suitability, privacy, and state insurance regulations, to ground AI strategy in what is permissible as well as what is possible.
Develop and curate a library of reusable AI and agentic UX patterns for consumer and client experiences (e.g., confidence and uncertainty signaling, progressive disclosure and contextual explainability, conversational handoff and escalation, agentic task delegation and status transparency) to reduce fragmentation and accelerate consistent, intentional design.
Recommend standards for consistent AI experience treatment across consumer and client personas while maintaining intentional nuance where lifecycle stages, product types, or vulnerability considerations warrant meaningfully different approaches.
Work with Product Design and Product Management to embed these patterns into how experiences are designed and built.
Design and facilitate workshops and collaborative forums to gather input and facilitate alignment from a broad stakeholder set, translating outputs into structured frameworks, decision models, and strategic recommendations.
Develop experience-oriented risk-complexity frameworks to align partners on appropriate levels of AI automation, assistance, and autonomy across consumer and client use cases.
Develop shared frameworks for human-AI interaction patterns calibrated to the risk profiles and varying financial literacy levels of consumer and client personas; ensure frameworks are validated with product, design, and delivery partners before scaling.
Contribute to AI experience governance frameworks and guardrail standards, and work with Business, Product Management, Technology, and Operations partners to ensure accountability is embedded within the teams responsible for execution and delivery.
Participate in alignment between AI experience strategies and consumer protection, compliance, legal, and regulatory requirements, surfacing constraints early and translating them into applicable guidance that product and delivery teams can act on.
Build and maintain strong working relationships across Product Management, Product Design, Consumer Marketing, Technology, Enablement, Data and AI, Compliance, and Program Management.
Communicate strategy, frameworks, and governance models clearly to senior leadership and working-level teams, and serve as a credible contributor to AI experience strategy discussions.
Maintain working fluency across key AI and agentic domains, including generative AI and LLMs, agentic and multi-step task automation, predictive and next-best-action models, conversational AI and virtual assistants, and RAG-based knowledge systems, sufficient to engage credibly with technical partners and evaluate capability claims.
Maintain hands-on familiarity with AI tools and platforms sufficient to use them in concept development, evaluate AI experience quality from direct experience, and model effective AI adoption for cross-functional partners.
Bring a pragmatic lens to AI capability evaluation: unlock the art of the possible while maintaining healthy skepticism toward solutions in search of a problem.