Managing Director, AI Enablement – Hybrid AZ

Best Western International • Phoenix, AZ

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

Join BWH Hotels – Where Passion Meets Purpose At BWH® Hotels, we don't just offer employment opportunities, we create opportunities to be part of something extraordinary. As a global leader in hospitality for nearly 80 years, our vision is to inspire travel through unique experiences. Joining our corporate team means becoming part of a dynamic and inclusive community that values innovation, collaboration, and making a meaningful impact in the travel industry. Headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, BWH Hotels boasts a powerful portfolio of 18 brands, including WorldHotels™, Best Western® Hotels & Resorts, and SureStay Hotels®, with approximately 4,300 hotels in over 100 countries. We take pride in our top-ranking employee engagement scores and foster a workplace culture where your contributions truly matter. Join us and be part of a team that's shaping the future of hospitality! Job Purpose BWH Hotels is seeking a Managing Director, AI Enablement to direct the roadmap and end-to-end delivery of the AI initiatives across the organization. The Managing Director, AI Enablement leads an AI architect and a small team of engineers, directing technical execution against prioritized business outcomes. The role blends technical product leadership, program and project management, and business-relationship management — setting direction, driving prioritization and value-based trade-off decisions, and ensuring initiatives are delivered on scope, on time, and on budget while advancing the enterprise’s adoption of AI capabilities. This is a technical, hands-on leadership role. It ensures the enterprise’s AI efforts are focused, prioritized, and value-driven; plays a key part in aligning AI initiatives across the organization; ensures AI is adopted consistently and effectively; and gives leadership clear visibility into AI’s impact — overseeing shared AI capabilities and responsible-AI governance.

Requirements

• 10–15 years of technology delivery experience.
• Demonstrated success owning end-to-end delivery of complex, cross-functional initiatives tied to business outcomes.
• Experience serving as a technology and business partner to senior executives.
• Strong command of agile delivery, product operating models, and roadmap/delivery tooling.
• Relationship building and collaboration across diverse, matrixed stakeholders and executive partners.
• Ability to surface, prioritize, and balance multiple stakeholder priorities.
• Strong project and program management skills across multiple concurrent initiatives and deadlines.
• Experience determining and overseeing software development initiatives and estimating resource requirements.
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills, leveraging data to inform decision-making.
• Strategic thinking and strong business acumen.
• Demonstrated success defining and building products and communicating complex technical information clearly to executives verbally and in writing.

Nice To Haves

• Strong technical expertise.
• Experience leading AI/ML, agentic, or data product initiatives.
• Hands-on experience with modern AI platforms and tooling.
• Experience with AI governance and adoption/enablement programs is strongly preferred.
• MBA or advanced degree preferred.
• Background in hospitality, travel, retail, or enterprise commerce/platforms preferred.

Responsibilities

• Direct the multi-year roadmap for AI initiatives across the organization.
• Develop a deep understanding of business goals, guest needs, and market and technology trends to inform priorities and proactively propose new solutions.
• Establish roadmaps and release plans that satisfy requirements and achieve measurable business outcomes; continuously monitor product performance and champion improvements.
• Drive prioritization and trade-off decisions tied to business value and return on investment.
• Align investment and team capacity to the highest-value outcomes; sequence and balance the backlog across competing demands.
• Manage investment decisions and product finances, maximizing value while minimizing cost, and surface trade-offs transparently to stakeholders.
• Own end-to-end delivery of key initiatives — from concept through launch, adoption, and value realization.
• Consult across teams to ensure use of AI is understood and aligned with Enterprise strategy and standards.
• Direct engineering execution against prioritized business outcomes; guide teams to scope, plan, and deliver work using agile methods and established best practices (e.g., reusability).
• Proactively identify and remove blockers, dependencies, and risks — including technical and resourcing challenges.
• Ensure alignment and adherence to enterprise architecture, security, compliance, and financial standards.
• Establish and maintain integrated delivery plans, milestones, and schedules across product owners and project managers.
• Manage scope, timelines, budgets, resources, dependencies, and risks across multiple concurrent initiatives.
• Apply consistent project and program management disciplines — intake, stage-gates, RAID (risks/assumptions/issues/dependencies) tracking, and status reporting — using enterprise roadmap and delivery tools.
• Report delivery status, risks, and outcomes to business stakeholders and technology leadership on a predictable cadence.
• Build trusted, executive-level relationships; understand the business strategy and translate it into a prioritized, well-shaped technology demand pipeline.
• Manage demand intake, challenge and refine requests, and connect business needs to enterprise capabilities and shared platforms.
• Own value realization — ensure delivered technology produces the intended business outcomes, and communicate that value back to the business.
• Manage expectations, resolve conflicts quickly, and act as the connective tissue across product, engineering, architecture, and the business.
• Recruit, develop, and retain top talent while building leadership depth and succession.
• Set clear goals and standards, create forums for feedback, and resolve conflicts quickly to minimize churn.
• Model enterprise collaboration across Technology and business functions.
• Provide executive-level updates on progress, outcomes, risks, and lessons learned.
• Define, track, and communicate relevant KPIs and OKRs that measure the product’s contribution to business goals.
• Represent the function in governance forums and steering committees, ensuring transparent, well-informed decision-making.
• Champion adoption and consumption of delivered product capabilities across the enterprise.
• Focus, align, and accelerate AI adoption across the enterprise — and lead the technical delivery behind it.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership for the enterprise’s AI work, leading an AI architect and a small team of engineers who design, build, and deliver AI solutions; this role requires strong technical expertise.
• Serve as the key point for aligning AI initiatives across the organization — connecting business and technology teams and concentrating effort on the highest-value, feasible use cases.
• Focus and prioritize the enterprise AI initiative portfolio, and establish governance, responsible-AI guardrails, and value tracking so leadership has clear visibility into AI’s impact.
• Keep pace with the rapid evolution of AI and educate the organization on how other companies are applying AI and on new frontier models worth considering — translating the external landscape into practical opportunities for the business.
• Lead the processes to embed AI into employee productivity — creating training and enablement programs and evaluating productivity tools (e.g., Copilot, Claude, and similar) for adoption across the workforce.
• Oversee shared AI platform capabilities and lead build-vs-buy decisions (e.g., LLM vs. ML, in-house vs. partner solutions such as Kore.ai).
• Leads and manages an AI Architect and a small team of engineers who design, build, and deliver AI solutions; may also direct product owners and project managers assigned to AI initiatives.
• Provides input to — and/or make hiring, performance, and development decisions.
• Directs the work of engineering and cross-functional delivery resources through the product operating model.

Benefits

• Medical/Dental/Vision available day one
• Vacation/Sick- accruals start day one
• Paid company holidays and personal holidays to celebrate what’s important to you
• 401K - company contribution and match (U.S.)
• Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) – company contribution and match (Canada)
• Employee discounts/hotel discounts
• Free financial and health wellness programs
• Tuition Reimbursement

What This Job Offers

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