Director of AI

WM Synergy LLC • Houston, TX

1d • $200,000 - $240,000 • Remote

About The Position

WM Synergy is seeking a Director of AI to lead their strategic pivot towards an AI-powered Outcomes Company for SMB manufacturers and distributors. This is a builder role for someone who wants to define what AI looks like at a 25-year services firm transitioning into something new. The Director will lead a small, focused team, coach consultants and engineers, and turn deep manufacturing and distribution expertise into productized AI offerings. The role involves shaping the AI strategy in partnership with the CEO, CSO, and ELT, leading the AI team, running the AI Practitioner Academy, managing customer feedback, delivering productized agents, overseeing AI spend (FinOps), and managing the Idea-to-Production Factory. Success in 12-18 months includes a clear AI vision, widespread AI adoption among consultants, successful productized agents, a functioning AI FinOps offering, controlled AI spend, and a scalable team.

Requirements

• 5+ years of relevant experience.
• Hands-on AI builder. Direct experience with Claude/Anthropic, agent frameworks, RAG, and evaluation systems. You can architect and ship, not just delegate.
• Track record of leading small, high-performing teams across technical and functional disciplines.
• Strong commercial instincts. Comfortable with margin profiles, pricing conversations, and customer-facing engagements.
• Experience in SMB or mid-market services, ideally in manufacturing, distribution, ERP, or adjacent industries.
• Production agents, not demos. Hands-on with agent frameworks, RAG and retrieval, and evaluation tooling, and you build in the reliability basics every agent needs: bounded loops, eval criteria, monitoring, and human checkpoints.
• Can read and write code and make the architecture calls, not just delegate them.
• Comfortable working in a modern cloud and wiring agents into ERP, CRM, and operational systems through clean APIs and trustworthy data.
• Strong handle on AI cost. Token economics, model tiering and routing, caching, and consumption tied to a real budget.

Nice To Haves

• Exposure to Acumatica, Sage Intacct, Infor, or comparable mid-market ERP ecosystems.
• Background that blends startup builder energy with services-firm discipline.
• Has stood up an AI program or center of excellence, including the operating model, governance, and the path from proof of concept to production.
• Experience driving AI adoption across delivery teams with tools like Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or Cursor.

Responsibilities

• Partner with the CEO, CSO and ELT to shape and continuously refine the WM Synergy AI strategy.
• Create and continuously communicate a shared vision of where the AI practice is going.
• Translate market signals, customer needs, and competitive moves into a roadmap the team can execute against.
• Surface market and customer signals back to the ELT.
• Lead a small, focused AI team and hire and develop 1 to 2 Business Analysts, agent engineers, and/or AI experts in year one.
• Add fractional or part-time specialists as needed (FinOps, evaluations, data engineering).
• Coach and support consultants, functional and technical, and software engineers as they learn to build agents, ERP customizations, reports, and productized IP based on their industry expertise.
• Run the AI Practitioner Academy.
• Grow the Skill Library.
• Run the customer feedback loop.
• Deliver the productized agent roadmap.
• Build 3 to 5 industry-specific agents in year one tied to manufacturing and distribution workflows.
• Partner with Sales and Delivery to support customer-facing AI engagements, from scoping through deployment and optimization.
• Own all internal AI spend: Anthropic, open-source infrastructure, and so on.
• Build cost dashboards, model-routing policies, and consumption governance.
• Establish token discipline as a team practice: bounded-loop design, model tiering, caching, prompt optimization, evaluations.
• Build AI FinOps as an external service line, assessment, governance, model selection, value tracking, turning the discipline we build internally into recurring customer revenue.
• Run the Idea-to-Production Factory in partnership with the AI Council.
• Maintain the AI Project Submission Form, value-per-token forecasts, and reliability standards (bounded loops, evaluation criteria, human-checkpoint design).
• Own the decision framework for when we use Claude/Cowork, when we use Velocity Suite, when we use Acumatica's native AI, and when we use open-weight models.
• Maintain the architecture standards across the team.
• Make reliability an economic discipline.

Benefits

• Direct reporting line to the ELT. Hands-on visibility, real authority, and real accountability.
• A working AI foundation already in place: AI Council, Practitioner Academy, 100+ skills, approved budget, 25+ active users.
• A clear promotion path. As the practice scales and delivers measurable outcomes, this role grows into VP, AI Strategy & Practice or Chief AI Officer.
• Competitive base, performance incentives, and equity participation aligned to the company's growth plan.
• Remote work, with regular customer and office travel.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed