Director, AI Enablement

Church's Chicken•Atlanta, GA

4d•Onsite

About The Position

Church’s Texas Chicken is seeking a Director, AI Enablement to lead AI enablement across the organization. This player-coach role will serve as the primary connector between business needs and AI solutions, combining program management with training, solution curation, and technology evangelism. The ideal candidate will have a strong intellectual curiosity, an innovative and entrepreneurial mindset, and be energized by the rapid advancements in AI. This role involves working directly with business teams to identify high-value AI use cases, match them with appropriate solutions, manage initiatives from conception to adoption, and foster the necessary skills and cultural readiness for confident AI utilization.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Business, Information Technology, Organizational Development, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
5+ years combined experience in AI enablement, leveraging data/BI technologies, technology adoption, digital transformation, or program management.
Demonstrated track record of helping organizations adopt and benefit from emerging technologies.
Proven ability to engage business stakeholders across functions, identify technology-solvable problems, and translate requirements into well-scoped AI use case briefs or solution recommendations.
Experience designing and delivering technology training programs and enablement curricula for diverse audiences.
Experience evaluating AI tools, platforms, and vendors, including structured assessments and proof-of-concept engagements.
Strong program and project management skills, including tracking concurrent AI initiatives, managing stakeholder expectations, identifying risks, and providing portfolio-level status reporting.
Working knowledge of AI and generative AI, including LLMs, AI agents, prompt engineering, and enterprise AI applications.
Demonstrated ability to drive adoption and behavior change across organizational boundaries without direct authority.
Hands-on technical depth to prototype, evaluate, and critique AI solutions; familiarity with leading LLMs (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI GPT, Microsoft Copilot) and MCP integration frameworks.
Familiarity with data model and rules schema design supporting descriptive, analytic, and prescriptive AI outputs.
Proven vendor management skills, including evaluating providers, managing relationships, conducting performance reviews, and negotiating contracts.
Proven experience leveraging Big Data capabilities to deliver AI/ML solutions, including large-scale structured and unstructured data, distributed processing, and cloud data platforms.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Microsoft Azure, including Azure Data Lake, Synapse Analytics, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure OpenAI.
Experience in restaurant, retail, or multi-unit consumer-facing environments.
Familiarity with operational, marketing, and back-office contexts where AI use cases will be developed.

Responsibilities

Act as the primary connector between business teams and AI solutions, engaging with Marketing, Operations, Finance, Supply Chain, and Franchise partners to identify and curate AI use cases.
Translate business problems into well-scoped opportunity briefs and support partners hands-on from use case identification through adoption.
Own the enterprise AI enablement roadmap, maintaining a prioritized initiative pipeline, tracking program status, and measuring adoption against defined targets.
Lead AI solution and vendor evaluation, conducting structured assessments and making evidence-based recommendations.
Manage vendor relationships with rigor.
Design and deliver AI training programs, workshops, and introductory experiences for various roles and fluency levels.
Define and maintain a company-wide AI skills framework, mapping capability requirements to roles, identifying gaps, and prescribing learning progressions in partnership with HR.
Build and sustain an internal AI Champion network of early adopters.
Maintain an AI use case library documenting evaluated cases, deployed solutions, reusable patterns, and lessons learned.
Own enterprise AI governance policies, defining principles, standards, and guardrails for AI solution evaluation, approval, deployment, and monitoring.
Own AI security standards and policies, coordinating implementation of guidelines with IT Security, Legal, and Compliance.
Collaborate with the Senior Manager of Data Architecture, AI/BI Product Director, and Director of IT Operations to evaluate technology directions and align on platform and policy decisions.
Bring hands-on technical depth to prototype, evaluate, and critique AI solutions using leading LLMs (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI GPT, Microsoft Copilot) integrated with MCP servers and enterprise data.
Stay current with the AI landscape to serve as a credible internal voice on emerging technologies.