Director, AI Portfolio & Solutions

TKO Group Holdings, Inc•New York, CT

5d•$127,500 - $170,000•Hybrid

About The Position

TKO Group Holdings — the parent company of WWE, UFC, IMG, PBR, and On Location — is building the execution muscle to turn its AI & Data strategy into measurable outcomes across five distinct business units. The COE Portfolio & Solutions Lead is the general contractor at the center of that work and the SVP's delivery-side number two: the person who takes prioritized use cases out of the DTC front door and makes sure they get built, deployed, and tracked to business value. This role owns the COE's active delivery portfolio. It is accountable for BU relationships through the delivery lifecycle, for directing the external vendor pod through DTC intake, for maintaining delivery standards across active engagements, and for producing the ROI and executive narrative that keeps leadership aligned on what AI is actually producing. The role works in close partnership with the Business Process & AI Design Lead — who owns process mapping and solution specs — and hands off those specs to the right build path. The role works in close partnership with an AI Delivery Lead on the technical side, who provides engineering guidance and build quality oversight. This role drives the product and commercial agenda; the AI Delivery Lead drives the technical execution agenda. This is a Director-level role with enterprise scope. It requires someone with the seniority to hold EVP and SVP-level BU sponsors accountable to outcomes, the commercial credibility to direct a vendor pod with authority, and the executive presence to represent the COE delivery agenda in senior forums without the SVP in the room. The role reports into the SVP of AI & Data Transformation and operates with direct visibility to executive sponsors, BU leadership and the DTC governance forum.

Requirements

8-12 years of experience in enterprise technology delivery, transformation programme management, or management consulting — including at least 2 years working directly with AI or automation delivery in a hands-on capacity.
Track record of owning outcomes at enterprise scale across complex, matrixed organizations.
Demonstrated experience managing external delivery vendors or systems integrators — including SOW governance, milestone accountability, delivery health tracking, and commercial discipline.
Proven ability to own value realization: defining measurable success criteria at intake, tracking actuals in production, and reporting business-level outcomes — not project completion rates.
Track record of building trusted relationships with senior BU sponsors and holding delivery teams accountable without direct reporting lines.
Exceptional written and verbal communication — able to produce concise delivery updates, executive narratives, and decision memos with clear recommendations and no ambiguity about the ask.
Comfort operating in a matrixed, build-stage environment where the delivery model is being established, not inherited — bias for action alongside rigorous thinking.

Nice To Haves

Experience scaling a COE or transformation delivery function from early stage — building the methodology as the work runs, not implementing a pre-existing playbook.
Experience delivering AI, agentic, or automation solutions in an enterprise context — specifically at the delivery oversight and vendor management layer.
Understanding of how AI builds behave differently from traditional technology implementations: iterative, data-dependent, hard to estimate.
Familiarity with low-code/no-code agent platforms, RAG-based systems, or enterprise AI tooling — enough to have a credible conversation with vendor delivery leads and DAPS technical teams.
Experience working in the sports, media, entertainment, or live events industry — or with organizations managing large content libraries, talent relationships, and fan-facing digital products.
Tool fluency across enterprise AI and delivery platforms (e.g., Glean, Sana, ServiceNow, Snowflake, Jira/Confluence or equivalent).

Responsibilities

Own the COE's active delivery portfolio — what is in scoping, what is in build, what is in production, and what is stalled. Portfolio tracked at initiative level: scope, build path, delivery health, adoption status, and value.
Direct vendor pod work packages through DTC intake — determining what gets built next, in what order, against what requirements brief. This role is the primary accountability forum for scope and sequencing.
Work closely with the AI Delivery Lead to ensure product requirements translate cleanly into technical delivery — flagging scope or quality issues early and keeping delivery moving.
Ensure every deliverable meets production standards before it enters production — holding the milestone gate on scope and value criteria, The vendor builds, this role confirms the solution delivers against the business requirement.
Track vendor delivery health across active engagements: scope stability, milestone progress, risk flags, and escalation signals. Surface issues early with clear options and a recommended path — not status updates.
Own value realization tracking for every active use case — measurable success criteria agreed at intake, actuals tracked in production, outcomes reported to BU sponsors and DTC on a defined cadence.
Partner with the DTC PMO Director on portfolio sequencing — translating the prioritized intake queue into a realistic delivery plan that reflects vendor capacity and BU readiness.
Serve as the COE's primary point of contact for BU and CSS sponsors through the delivery lifecycle — maintaining trusted working relationships with UFC, WWE, IMG, On Location, PBR, and CSS function leads.
Manage BU expectations on timeline, scope, and what the delivered solution will and will not do — proactively, not reactively.
Lead adoption tracking post-launch: is the agent or solution being used? Are the expected behaviours changing? Where is adoption stalling and why?
Partner closely with the Change Management function in People & Culture to ensure every delivery has a corresponding adoption and change plan — not as a hand-off after launch, but as a co-designed workstream that runs in parallel with build. Delivery is not complete until the behaviour change is evidenced.
Identify use case adjacencies across BUs — patterns that can be reused, infrastructure that can be shared, vendor work that can be leveraged across more than one initiative — and surface them to the portfolio planning process.
Own the commercial relationship with the vendor on behalf of the COE — SOW integrity, milestone acceptance, capability transfer, spend pacing, and commercial performance tracking. Escalate commercial issues to the SVP before they require renegotiation.
Enable capability transfer over time — ensuring code, prompts, runbooks, and documentation are delivered to TKO at each milestone as contractually committed. Capability transfer lands with TKO engineering/technical teams, with the COE confirming completeness against the requirements brief.
Partner with the AI Delivery Lead on vendor pod delivery — the COE accepts scope and value delivery; the AI Delivery Lead accepts technical quality. Both sign off before a milestone is closed.
Partner with the SVP on vendor selection processes — contributing the delivery operations and commercial governance perspective to evaluation criteria, due diligence, and reference conversations.
Define and maintain the value measurement framework for the COE delivery portfolio — productivity metrics, time-to-value, cost-per-outcome, adoption rates, and business-level impact. Not milestone completion.
Partner with the Manager, Portfolio ROI & Value (analytics transfer) to produce the enterprise AI scorecard — the single source of truth for what is identified, approved, in-flight, and delivered across TKO.
Produce delivery-layer reporting for DTC, Leadership Forum, and executive audiences — concise, outcome-forward, and honest about where value is being created and where it is not.
Partner with Finance and initiative owners to ensure business cases are defensible at the time of intake and revisited honestly at the time of delivery closure.
Contribute to the COE's AI literacy and enablement agenda — specifically ensuring BU AI Champions understand what delivery-ready looks like and what a well-run use case build feels like.
Support executive narrative development for leadership updates, SteerCo materials, and board-ready progress reporting where required.