Director, AI Product, Innovation & Emerging Technology

Pfizer • New York City, NY

1d

About The Position

The Director, AI Product, Innovation & Emerging Technology reports to the Sr. Director AI Product Innovation Lead within the PGS Data, Analytics & AI Transformation Organization. The role combines strategic product leadership with hands-on agentic AI expertise to identify, evaluate, and advance transformative AI opportunities across PGS. It drives high-impact, enterprise-scale AI use cases that deliver measurable business value and accelerate Pfizer’s adoption of emerging technologies.

The Director partners with senior business leaders, Digital, platform engineering, and the agentic AI delivery team to turn emerging capabilities into scalable business solutions. The role personally builds and iterates rapid, working agentic prototypes to test feasibility, refine requirements, and demonstrate value before production development. It bridges business discovery, hands-on experimentation, and engineering delivery, partnering with the agentic delivery team on production readiness while that team retains ownership of production engineering, deployment, and operational support.

The position also shapes investment strategies, value cases, and AI priorities; promotes product management standards, governance, and responsible AI practices; and helps establish frameworks for sustainable scaling. The role requires domestic and international travel of up to 15% and flexibility to work off-hours or extended/non-standard hours during peak periods.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field and at least 8 years of relevant experience, or a master’s degree and at least 7 years of experience.
• Significant product management and innovation leadership experience, including advancing early-stage concepts through experimentation, productization, and adoption at scale.
• Hands-on knowledge of LLMs and agentic AI, including prompt and context engineering, RAG, tool/function calling, orchestration, state and memory, and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Ability to determine when an agent, a simpler AI workflow, or conventional automation is appropriate.
• Demonstrated ability to personally build and iterate working agentic prototypes using at least one agent-building platform or framework, connecting models to tools and approved data sources.
• Experience using prototypes to validate feasibility, gather user feedback, and refine product requirements beyond prompt-only demonstrations.
• Practical technical proficiency writing, reading, and debugging lightweight Python or JavaScript; working with APIs and structured data; and inspecting agent execution traces and evaluation results.
• Sufficient technical depth to engage engineers on architecture, integration, failure modes, and production-readiness trade-offs.
• Track record developing business cases, investment strategies, and value realization frameworks that secured executive sponsorship and funding.
• Ability to influence senior leaders and drive strategic decisions across highly matrixed organizations without direct authority.
• Strong understanding of AI governance, responsible AI practices, product operating models, and enterprise delivery frameworks, including the distinction between experimental prototypes and secure, tested, monitored, supportable production solutions.
• Exceptional communication skills and ability to translate technical concepts into business outcomes for senior leadership audiences.
• Demonstrated thought leadership through industry engagement, external partnerships, innovation forums, speaking opportunities, publications, or enterprise-wide influence.
• Ability to shape organizational capabilities, standards, and ways of working that drive sustained business impact beyond individual projects.
• Ability to travel domestically and internationally up to 15% of the year.
• Willingness to work off-hours to accommodate global time zones and support teams and stakeholders across sites.
• Willingness to work extended or non-standard hours during peak periods, including major pilot launches, business case reviews, or executive readouts.
• Candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S. by any employer; U.S. work visa sponsorship is not available now or in the future, and permanent U.S. work authorization is required.

Nice To Haves

• Strong external network across the AI vendor and technology ecosystem, with a track record of translating outside innovation into internal pilots and success stories.
• Experience with code-first agent frameworks, enterprise agent platforms, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and reusable tool or skill libraries.
• Experience partnering with engineering teams to advance prototypes into production, including evaluation automation, observability, version control, and release practices.
• Experience establishing or contributing to a product guild, center of excellence, or similar cross-enterprise standards body.
• Deep Pfizer colleague network, particularly across PGS, Digital, and Data, Analytics & AI Transformation, and a track record of building sponsorship for bold ideas in complex, matrixed environments.
• Experience applying AI to pharmaceutical manufacturing, supply chain, quality, or technology transfer, with understanding of intended use, risk-based validation, auditability, and human oversight for GxP-relevant use cases.
• Advanced knowledge of responsible AI principles and their application to novel product development.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the AI product innovation strategy for emerging and transformative PGS use cases, identifying opportunities with significant business impact and long-term competitive advantage.
• Lead discovery, assessment, and productization of lighthouse AI initiatives, defining business outcomes, success measures, and pathways from concept through production and enterprise adoption.
• Design, build, and iterate rapid agentic AI prototypes using enterprise-approved platforms, agent frameworks, and lightweight code; use working, tool-enabled workflows to test hypotheses and incorporate user feedback.
• Translate business processes into agent workflow designs, specifying goals, data sources, tool interactions, human approval points, and exception handling.
• Establish representative evaluation scenarios and acceptance criteria for task success, output quality, safe tool use, latency, and cost to support proceed, pivot, or stop decisions.
• Partner with the agentic delivery team from discovery through implementation, contributing to technical design reviews and backlog refinement.
• Provide prototype code or configurations, workflow specifications, evaluation results, and known limitations to accelerate engineering delivery and reduce rework.
• Advise senior leaders on AI investment priorities and help stakeholders evaluate opportunities, risks, value realization, and resource requirements.
• Develop and socialize business cases, investment recommendations, and value realization frameworks to support funding decisions and executive sponsorship.
• Monitor emerging AI technologies, foundation models, industry trends, and competitive developments, translating insights into actionable opportunities for Pfizer.
• Partner with agentic delivery, Digital, platform engineering, data, and architecture leaders to assess model and orchestration choices, integration dependencies, and trade-offs involving reliability, cost, latency, and scalability.
• Align solutions with enterprise standards and reusable capabilities rather than creating isolated prototypes.
• Establish and promote best practices for AI product management, innovation governance, and responsible AI adoption.
• Embed approved data access, least-privilege tool permissions, human oversight, traceability, and risk-appropriate evaluation into prototypes; partner with Quality and delivery teams on applicable GxP and production-readiness requirements.
• Influence enterprise product strategy and roadmap decisions by identifying reusable solutions, scaling opportunities, and cross-functional synergies.
• Communicate complex technology trends and opportunities clearly to executive stakeholders and serve as a visible ambassador for AI product innovation.

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.
• Medical, prescription drug, dental, and vision coverage.
• Eligibility to participate in Pfizer’s Global Performance Plan, with a bonus target of 20.0% of base salary.
• Eligibility to participate in a share-based long-term incentive program.
• Relocation assistance may be available based on business needs and/or eligibility.

What This Job Offers

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