Senior Manager, AI Program Management

• Build IDC’s AI program-management function, including standards, rituals, templates, portfolio reporting, intake, prioritization, decision tracking, and delivery governance.• Partner directly with the VP of AI to translate strategy into an actionable roadmap across AI platform, agent products, governance, observability, adoption, and business use cases.• Turn loosely defined business opportunities into clear charters with problem statements, expected value, owners, scope, dependencies, success metrics, milestones, and definition of done.• Create and operate a portfolio view of AI initiatives, making tradeoffs and capacity constraints visible to executive leadership.• Lead end-to-end delivery of complex AI programs involving engineering, data, security, legal, enterprise architecture, product, and business stakeholders.• Own intake and prioritization end-to-end — run the pragmatic process that decides what enters the portfolio, in what order, and distinguishes experiments from scalable production investments.• Work directly with delivery teams to gather deliverables, status, and artifacts, following up yourself when something is late or off-track rather than waiting for teams to report up.• Define a repeatable delivery lifecycle for AI products—from discovery and data readiness through pilot, evaluation, production launch, adoption, and ongoing measurement.• Drive cross-functional alignment on requirements, risks, decisions, dependencies, and timelines; escalate early when delivery, security, data, or adoption risks threaten outcomes.• Create executive-ready communication that clearly explains progress, business value, risks, decisions needed, and next steps.• Help establish measurement standards for AI initiatives, including adoption, quality, reliability, cost, risk, and realized business value.• Partner with technical leaders to ensure plans account for architecture, integrations, data access, evaluation, security, governance, operational support, and change management.• Help build the operating cadence for the AI organization: weekly delivery reviews, monthly portfolio and value reviews, and executive steering updates.• Mentor future program and project managers as the function grows.Initial focus areasIn the first year, this role will help organize and deliver a portfolio that includes:• Enterprise AI platform and shared AWS foundations for secure agent deployment• MCP and enterprise-tool integration standards• AI observability, evaluation, governance, and cost-management capabilities• Agentic business solutions across sales, research/data collection, service operations, and internalproductivity• AI adoption, training, change management, and business-value measurement• Executive-facing visibility into the AI portfolio, operational health, and outcomes

• A demonstrated bias toward doing the work yourself — writing the charter, building the tracker, chasing the blocker — rather than assigning it and following up in a status meeting.• 8+ years of program, product, transformation, or portfolio-management experience, including ownership of complex cross-functional technology programs.• Meaningful experience delivering AI, data, analytics, cloud-platform, automation, or enterprise-software initiatives. Direct generative AI or agentic AI experience is strongly preferred.• Experience building or materially improving a PMO, program-management practice, product operations function, or portfolio-management model.• Strong ability to convert ambiguity into structured, practical plans without creating unnecessary process.• Experience working with technical teams and understanding the realities of data, integrations, cloud infrastructure, security, software delivery, and production operations.• Strong executive presence and excellent written communication; able to frame decisions and tradeoffs clearly for both technical and non-technical leaders.• A bias toward business outcomes: you know that a successful AI initiative must drive adoption and measurable value, not merely ship a model or feature.• Comfort operating in a lean, evolving organization where priorities will change and you will need to create the structure as you go.

• Strong judgment about when to standardize, when to experiment, and when to stop work that is not producing value.Preferred qualifications• Experience leading enterprise AI, data, or digital-transformation portfolios.• Experience in a consulting, research, technology, SaaS, professional-services, or data-products environment.• Familiarity with AWS, enterprise data platforms, Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Jira/Confluence, and modern AI/agent architectures.• Experience with AI governance, responsible AI, model evaluation, observability, security, or change management.• PMP, PgMP, SAFe, Agile, product-management, or similar credentials are welcome but not required.Working styleYou are structured without being bureaucratic. You can operate at executive altitude and still get into the details when a team is blocked. You are comfortable challenging vague requests, surfacing difficult tradeoffs, and bringing clarity to a rapidly changing AI landscape. This is a hands-on role: you will personally drive plans, chase dependencies, and unblock work — not merely track status and report it upward. Most importantly, you are energized by building a new function and helping an organization turn AI ambition into real, measurable outcomes.