Lead AI Business Consultant - must be willing to relocate to Abu Dhabi, 6-12 month contract
Position Summary
The Lead AI Business Consultant (AIBC) is a senior level technical thought leader within the EMEA Sales Organization who will engage with prospective clients, partners and sales teams, as part of the pre-sales function, on the most technically complex strategic AI opportunities and Proofs of Concept (PoCs).
The AIBC has a good grasp of IT industry trends, broad and deep IT industry experience, and a high degree of business acumen. The AIBC has a key role in engaging prospects in conversations about their business processes and business problems, solution requirements, the possibilities of AI and technology solutions to help them in their business and digital transformation.
The AIBC will be responsible for defining the AI solution strategy for prospects. Including the industry and business approach, use cases and user stories, PoC approach and engagement with AI Engineers, post-sales implementation methods and business adoption plans and will influence the commercial and financial models.
An AIBC will need to have a broad base of skills and experience and will need to work in cross-functional teams in an autonomous manner. The AIBC will have a proven pedigree of working on and leading large IT transformation projects whether those are consulting, pre- and post-sales transformational IT services or design, build and run projects in IT departments.
This senior level resource will be comfortable quickly establishing themselves as a thought leader and trusted advisor with their customer stakeholders. The AIBC must be knowledgeable across industry, business, IT strategy and technology domains particularly AI, and be comfortable presenting to customer IT executives and c-suite, discussing process with business managers, working with AI engineering teams on model and data architecture or with platform engineers designing technical architectures, operating models and integrations – from boardroom to hackathons to AI modelling to operations.
Critically they will be accustomed to creating a value proposition that is directly linked to a prospect’s business model and issues. The successful AIBC will be expert in quickly learning new business models and drivers and will be able to articulate how Insight and our partners can help them meet their goals. The AIBC will keep up with the latest trends, be a disruptive thinker and have experience of driving technology change in organizations.
The AIBC will have come from technical background and have transitioned through an architecture role before growing their business and commercial skills. Understanding a client’s business fundamentals and industry drivers using consultative methods, then being able to build rapport with business leaders is key to ensuring that new disruptive approaches are taken up.
A AIBC will be broadly technical across many areas and deep in a handful – importantly, they must not only understand AI, applications and cloud technology but also data science and data pipelines, modern enterprise IT architecture, applications architecture and integration, SDLC, Agile application development and DevOps methods, CICD, automation principles, hybrid cloud architecture and migrations, infrastructure operations, project management and cybersecurity.
The AIBC will have gravitas and authenticity. They will be expected to have first class interpersonal skills combined with a comfortable, open and compelling communication and presentation style. These skills, combined with proven AI domain knowledge, will create customer confidence in them and by extension Insight. A AIBC should maintain relationships with several customer technical executives and meet on a regular basis to better understand the market and customer challenges and to cultivate opportunities.
Diplomacy/Empathy or Emotional Quotient (EQ). The role of AIBC requires a high degree of diplomacy and a strong EQ. It is imperative that we can look at our value propositions from the viewpoint of our customers, therefore empathy is critical. Being able to represent the needs of the customer into Insight will also need a high degree of EQ.
A AIBC must be able to apply their experience and confidence to take ownership of Insight’s solution and create structure when needed to deal with ambiguity or no existing Insight offering with which to fulfil the client’s requirements.
The AIBC will produce collateral for their customers in the form of presentations, short papers, demonstrations, proofs of concepts etc. These can be harvested back into Insight for reuse. They will also be an external influencer in the form of social media content, blogs, webinars, speaking at industry events and publishing whitepapers.
The AIBC will work in close partnership with the Delivery and CTO organizations to shape and distribute technical strategy to the field and drive campaigns and market initiatives. They will participate in the overall sales to delivery feedback loop, establishing credibility and trust with key leaders, and with key sales and solutions leaders. The AIBC will create, refine, and own a framework for collecting and prioritizing market and product feedback from the field. They will broadcast roadmap current state, prioritization, and changes back to the field, while minimizing field feedback that circumvents this process.
The AIBC will be a believer in lifelong learning. Personal development will take up ~10% of their time. They will also attend industry conferences and disseminate the information that they have gathered to their peers and colleagues.
Primary Duties / Responsibilities
● First class influencing skills, able to quickly become a thought leader and trusted advisor.
● A client-first mentality and focus, with a passion to improve our client’s business through Insight’s unique technology and business value.
● Understand commercial and disruptive technology trends in the client’s market and understand how these interact to constrain and inform a target solution.
● Understand client business by actively researching their industry macro trends to determine
business issues. Understand who the leaders and disruptors are in their peer group and why.
