Manager, AI Strategy & Portfolio Management

Ford • Dearborn, MI

14h • $115,500 - $218,100 • Hybrid

About The Position

Ford’s Central AI Team is the enterprise hub responsible for scaling AI and agentic solutions across the company. This role owns the pipeline for AI opportunities, from initial idea to enterprise-scale decision. The AI Portfolio Manager is responsible for running the intake and inventory process for every AI opportunity moving through Sandbox, Functional Program, and Enterprise Bet stages. This role is the operational backbone behind early portfolio decisions, ensuring leadership has an accurate, current view of the pipeline, costs, and tradeoffs between funding different opportunities. The ideal candidate is organized, comfortable working with cross-functional teams, and able to transform nascent ideas into clear business cases with defined sponsors, funding requests, and decision points.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of relevant education and experience.
• 3+ years of experience in program management, portfolio management, business operations, or strategy roles involving intake and prioritization of competing initiatives.
• Strong organizational skills and comfort owning a live inventory or pipeline that changes constantly and needs to stay accurate.
• Ability to extract a clear business case — problem, value, sponsor, funding, readiness — from a stakeholder who hasn't fully articulated it yet.
• Experience preparing tradeoff analysis or prioritization materials used in a leadership decision-making process.
• Comfort working across a matrixed organization, leveraging cross-functional leadership skills.
• Strong attention to detail combined with the ability to synthesize a messy set of inputs into something clean and decision-ready.
• 3+ years of Excel/PowerPoint or related skills for building tradeoff views, pipeline trackers, and prioritization materials.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree.
• Experience in automotive, technology, or another large-scale enterprise environment managing a multi-initiative portfolio.
• Background in venture, corporate strategy, PMO, or business case development where you evaluated new ideas against a fixed pool of funding.
• Familiarity with how AI or technology pilots typically progress from experiment to scaled program, and what readiness signals predict success.
• Experience building or maintaining a portfolio tracking tool or system used by multiple stakeholders.
• Direct experience partnering with technical or product teams to translate a capability into a funding-ready business case.

Responsibilities

• Manage intake of new opportunities across Sandbox, Functional Program, and Enterprise Bet stages, running a consistent process for evaluation.
• Maintain the portfolio pipeline and opportunity inventory as the single source of truth for what’s in flight, its stage, and recent changes.
• Prepare prioritization inputs, tradeoff views, and start/stop/scale/sunset recommendations for leadership decision forums.
• Partner with business functions to clarify the business problem, sponsorship, value hypothesis, funding need, and readiness for each opportunity.
• Flag opportunities that are stalled, underfunded, or missing a clear sponsor.
• Support the Strategy & Comms Lead in building decision packages and progression materials with accurate pipeline data and analysis.

Benefits

• Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage
• Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up childcare and more
• Family building benefits including adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, fertility treatments, and more
• Vehicle discount program for employees and family members and management leases
• Tuition assistance
• Established and active employee resource groups
• Paid time off for individual and team community service
• A generous schedule of paid holidays, including the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day
• Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time.

What This Job Offers

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