Program Manager, Enterprise AI Literacy & Enablement

Applied Materials•Austin, TX

23h•Onsite

About The Position

Applied Materials is the world's largest supplier of semiconductor manufacturing equipment. How quickly our workforce harnesses AI directly shapes our ability to innovate, execute, and compete. This role sits on the team responsible for driving enterprise-wide AI adoption and culture-building: turning strategic intent into measurable workforce capability. You will design and run the programs that move Applied Materials employees from AI-curious to AI-proficient, and you will do so at the pace and scale a global technology manufacturer demands. This is not a training-catalog role. It is an enterprise change initiative, and you will own it.

Requirements

Running complex programs at enterprise scale. You have led large, cross-functional initiatives at companies with 5,000+ employees and know how to manage scope, stakeholders, timelines, and competing priorities without losing momentum.
Influencing without authority. You build trust and alignment with senior leaders and functional partners through credibility and clarity, not org-chart leverage — and you are comfortable presenting to executives on a regular basis.
Reading the organization. You pick up on unwritten culture, political dynamics, and decision-making patterns through observation — you don't need everything spelled out to know what will and won't work.
Anticipating second-order effects. Before making recommendations, you map downstream risks, stakeholder implications, and KPI impacts — and you flag them proactively rather than waiting to be asked.
Translating strategy into structured execution. You are equally at home writing a program charter and running a weekly status meeting; you know that strategy only matters if it lands in practice.
Facilitating executive workshops with confidence. You can design and lead a two-hour session with a roomful of skeptical senior leaders — adjusting on the fly when energy drops or a question derails the agenda.
Sustaining energy and credibility across a long initiative. AI enablement is a multi-year journey with inevitable plateaus; you keep stakeholders engaged, communicate wins clearly, and retool when a program isn't working.

Nice To Haves

5+ years of program or change management experience inside a large, complex enterprise; experience in a technology, semiconductor, or advanced manufacturing environment is a plus.
Demonstrated experience designing and facilitating executive-level learning experiences — preferably including AI or digital transformation content.
Hands-on familiarity with enterprise AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent productivity AI platforms; experience training others to use them is strongly preferred.
Exposure to responsible-AI or AI governance frameworks — including working with Legal, Compliance, or Data Governance teams to evaluate and mitigate AI-related risks.
Experience building or scaling an ambassador, champion, or peer-network program across multiple business units.

Responsibilities

Own the enterprise AI literacy roadmap. Define the multi-year curriculum strategy — segmented by role, function, and proficiency tier — and translate it into a concrete quarterly execution plan with named milestones and owners.
Drive measurable capability gains. Instrument every program initiative against a KPI framework that tracks usage and adoption rate, proficiency level by employee tier, time-saved and productivity impact, and confidence/sentiment scores — then report findings to senior leadership on a regular cadence.
Design and deliver leader-facing workshops. Build and facilitate hands-on sessions for people managers and executives on [Applied's AI tool stack, including Microsoft Copilot] — equipping leaders to model new working behaviors and set expectations for their teams.
Build and activate an AI Champion Network. Recruit, onboard, and hold accountable a distributed community of AI ambassadors across business units; provide them with enablement resources, feedback loops, and executive air cover so they can accelerate adoption where you cannot be present.
Lead change management, not just communications. Proactively map adoption barriers — cultural, technical, and structural — develop mitigation strategies, and work with managers to shift behaviors before resistance becomes inertia.
Partner on responsible-AI governance. Collaborate with Legal, Security, Compliance, and Data Governance stakeholders to ensure every program initiative remains aligned with Applied's responsible-AI principles and regulatory requirements.
Align and influence cross-functional stakeholders. Navigate a matrixed organization to secure buy-in, resources, and sponsorship from business unit leaders and senior executives — without direct authority over any of them.
Tie learning outcomes to business performance. Frame every program deliverable in terms of productivity improvement, operational efficiency, or competitive advantage — not only employee satisfaction or participation counts.
Iterate rapidly. Collect participant feedback, benchmark against industry peers, and refine program design continuously — treating each cohort as a data point, not a finish line.