Senior Director, AI Business Solutions Leader

Microsoft•Chicago, IL

5d•$155,800 - $303,600

About The Position

The Senior Director, AI Business Solutions Leader (Financial Services) leads a team of managers and technical specialists responsible for accelerating AI transformation, customer value realization, and consumption growth across Microsoft's Financial Services portfolio. This leader helps customers move from AI experimentation to enterprise-scale deployment of Microsoft Copilot, agents, business process solutions, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Azure AI technologies. Serving as a trusted advisor to senior customer executives, this leader partners with Banking, Capital Markets, and Insurance organizations to identify high-value AI opportunities, modernize business processes, and deliver measurable business outcomes. They work across Microsoft Sales, Customer Success, Engineering, Partner, and Delivery teams to remove barriers, drive adoption, and ensure customers successfully realize value from their AI investments. The role is accountable for building and leading a high-performing organization, developing technical and leadership talent, driving operational excellence, and creating a culture of accountability and customer obsession. Success is measured through customer business outcomes, AI adoption and usage, consumption growth, organizational health, and the ability to help customers transform critical business processes while meeting the security, compliance, and governance requirements of a highly regulated industry.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 10+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR equivalent experience.
5+ years people management experience, including managing consultant practice managers, technical sales managers, technical architect managers, and/or people managers.
This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship. Candidates must have authorization to work in the United States that does not now or in the future require employer sponsorship.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 15+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 12+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR equivalent experience.
8+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).
8+ years experience leading technical projects, teams, or functions.
Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications).
8+ years people management experience, including managing consultant practice managers, technical sales managers, technical architect managers, and/or people managers.

Responsibilities

Holds team accountable for driving operational excellence and proven practice standards throughout all sales stages/activities/tools of record (e.g., pipeline updates, time tracking). Drives team on orchestrating, collaborating, and influencing across Microsoft and customer/partner teams and leadership through on-strategy delivery to achieve customer/partner objectives and increase customer/partner satisfaction. Holds team accountable for anticipating and managing business and technical risks, adapting methodology and applying governance principles to identify, communicate, and minimize business and technical risks. Executes work in compliance with industry and Microsoft guidelines and procedures. Oversees continuous prioritization among competing demands in their work and identify where impact occurs with customers, ensuring alignment with business priorities and goals.
Drives team on proactively identifying, anticipating, and setting the foundation with the customer/partner for new cross-solution opportunities for Consumption, Usage & Unified expansion (especially Enhanced Solutions) at scale based on business value to customer/partner and clear understanding of the Microsoft value proposition for supported platforms to empower cloud success, foster and strengthen security and resiliency, and drive AI innovation. Defines the need for change management to ensure team members develop thorough understanding of customer's business and operations to advise on potential solutions. Drives team on acting as a role model for strategically consulting with, actively listening to and respectfully challenging customers/partners, building trust to then advocate for alternative architectures/solutions/approaches that shape and/or enhance customer requirements. Oversees team on driving the identification, anticipation, and evaluation of industry trends (e.g., customer industry verticals, information technology [IT] industry), gathering of customer/partner insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs, competitive landscape), and mapping of both existing and novel architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer/partner business outcomes. Holds teams accountable for capturing opportunities in appropriate systems, processes, and tools, working collaboratively across the organization to execute on opportunities.
Holds team accountable for delivering solutions in line with company methodologies (e.g., product offerings such as value-based deliverables [VBDs], advice, training, technical validation), ensuring proven practices and patterns are followed to prepare highly complex and/or impactful customers for operational readiness and achievement of their business goals and targets. Leveraging knowledge of change management proven practices and/or involving the change management team, proactively helps the customer deploy for long-term organizational adoption to increase customer satisfaction and drive consumption/usage. Oversees team on guiding highly complex and/or impactful customers/partners towards a well-architected (e.g., secure, resilient, artificial intelligence [AI]-enabled), and cost- and performance-optimized solution to increase retention and expansion opportunities. Provides expert guidance across teams on articulating the value of Unified and supports sellers, leading direct-to-customer engagements, and partnering with account teams to build consumption plans aligned with appropriate services. Holds teams accountable for providing feedback to Unified Delivery Team on VBDs to refine and further develop content.
Oversees team on anticipating, identifying, escalating, and mitigating blockers using appropriate tools and processes to accelerate solution deployment, value realization and usage/consumption for highly complex and/or impactful customers/scenarios. Holds team accountable for proactively applying expert business, technical, industry, and/or enterprise knowledge to architecture or support projects to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and to quickly resolve identified constraints and blockers expected to have the most impact, leveraging scalable and/or repeatable fixes whenever feasible. Is accountable for mitigation of senior technical decision makers (TDM)-level escalations, defining and implementing recommendations to resolve issues.
Supports and coaches team on innovating methods for proactively identifying and/or translating customer/partner problems into solutions aligned with Microsoft product and platform strategy, creating or improving an existing business model, and explaining why and/or how they meet customer/partner outcomes and return on investment (ROI) goals (e.g., via proof of concept, minimally viable product [MVP], rapid prototype) relative to competitive offerings. Holds team accountable for influencing, empowering, and driving the customer/partner and its leadership to set their technical strategy and accelerate their adoption and use of Microsoft product/platform strategy-aligned (cross-solution area) solutions. Oversees team on building, fostering, and maintaining relationships with, and influencing technical decision makers (TDMs) up to the C-suite level, and liaising between TDMs and business decision makers (BDMs). Leads and elevates interactions as needed with customers/partners' Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), and other C-level (CXO) roles to bridge understanding of security, compliance, operational and risk requirements and influence decision making across BDMs, TDMs, CIO and CISO teams, appropriately engaging additional subject matter experts when deeper expertise is required.
Oversees team on proactively acting as an advocate for and the voice of the customer/partner, sharing ideas, feedback, insights, success stories, and strategic/technical input with Engineering teams, Product Offerings teams, and internal communities across their organization, leveraging relevant insights from feedback tools and systems to influence teams to translate these insights into new or improved offerings for other customers/partners. Leads team on driving the identification of patterns across customers/partners/territories/industries and leveraging them with relevant industry perspective to develop strategic and actionable insights. Leads team on presenting compelling business cases and recommended architectures to program managers and leadership to advocate for and influence product roadmaps, decision making, bug fix prioritization, and own and drive initiatives as appropriate.
Mobilizes resources within the Customer Success Unit (CSU) and across Microsoft to solve issues. Drives team on acting as a role model for focusing on customer/partner experience through efficient delivery and ensuring a seamless and connected customer experience. Leads team on leveraging deep understanding of customer goals to advocate for and lead the definition of customer/partner conditions of success. Oversees team on anticipating and addressing customer/partner dissatisfaction and unmet needs, including leading customer confidence calls and creating and executing strategies to improve customer experience, value realization, and acceleration of transformation.
Managers deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring. Model: Live our culture. Embody our values. Practice our leadership principles. Coach: Define team objectives and outcomes. Enable success across boundaries. Help the team adapt and learn. Care: Attract and retain great people. Know each individual’s capabilities and aspirations. Invest in the growth of others.
Leads team on leveraging market insights and demand signals to partner with leadership in identifying relevant areas in which to drive up-skilling and/or accreditations based on demand. Drives team on role modeling technical readiness, both depth-aligned to solution area priorities and breadth-aligned to Customer Success Unit (CSU)/corporate initiatives (e.g., security, resilience, AI), and influencing across teams to drive their own technical readiness. Oversees team on acting as a mentor, leading readiness and upskilling activities in the team/organization by educating colleagues on technical and non-technical concepts and sharing proven practices. Leads and drives a culture of learning and coaching in both the internal technical community and the broader organization alongside managers towards business objectives.
Leads team on proactively identifying and anticipating gaps through delivery, communicating those gaps to relevant team members and internal/external stakeholders, and connecting gaps and patterns across business and technology areas that drive changes and improvements to products, intellectual property (IP) (both existing and new), technologies, and/or processes/practices that enable solutions to scale across customers. Oversees team on leading the development of and modifications to Microsoft's structured frameworks and methodologies. Leads team on providing thought leadership and innovation to customers/partners and internal communities at the worldwide level.
Leads team on leading the direction that internal virtual team members (brought together around technologies and customer/partner challenges) and stakeholders take with customers/partners by sharing ideas, insights, and strategic, technical input across boundaries, using knowledge of Microsoft architectures and their context in the competitive landscape, and actively pursuing opportunities that grow impact and capabilities of the broader organization. Guides team on serving as an industry-leading expert and driving recognition for Microsoft solutions by initiating and driving presentations and engagements with external and internal audiences (e.g., Tech Connect, Build, Ignite) Oversees team on driving collaborative efforts for contributing to and/or developing intellectual property (IP) and proactively identifying patterns where no IP exists (e.g., CoPilot and AI scenarios) to help build scalable and repeatable models. Initiates and drives external technical and non-technical community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, webcasts, blogs, hackathons) that elevate the Microsoft brand, sharing learnings across internal teams and leading their team to do the same. Coaches team on building an external influencer network, supporting Microsoft’s strategy and represents Microsoft's technology vision at events