CASE 1
Strategic programme, no internal experience.
You have a strategic AI programme, but your internal team has never managed a programme of this scale.
I coordinate AI programmes for global enterprises. From roadmap to execution. Internal teams, vendors, stakeholders. I translate business objectives into operational AI architectures.
No-one in the enterprise ever has enough time to coordinate a complex AI programme. The CTO is consumed by technology. The business owner by short-term priorities. Legal by contracts. External vendors have their own agenda.
The AI Program Manager is the person who holds it all together. Defines the roadmap, brings the right people into the right rooms, unblocks decisions, manages vendors, reports to the board, measures progress.
A role requiring three things at once: technical understanding of AI (to speak with developers), business understanding (to speak with decision-makers), and execution capability (to make things happen).
It's not a junior project manager role with a PMP certificate. It's a senior role for someone who has seen enough projects fail to know how to make them succeed.
You have a strategic AI programme, but your internal team has never managed a programme of this scale.
You have an AI programme in trouble, and you need someone to take it back from the outside, without internal politics.
You're starting a multi-year AI programme, and you want a senior Program Manager to structure it correctly from the start.
You have an internal Chief AI Officer, but you need an external advisor to support them on critical decisions, governance, vendor management.
· Multi-year roadmap and quarterly milestones
· Technology vendor selection and management
· Internal team coordination (IT, business, legal, comms)
· Governance and decision processes
· EU AI Act compliance documentation
· Board reporting and change management
· KPI and ROI measurement
· Cultural change management
Italian food multinational, food retail sector. Objective: reduce supply chain waste by 20% in twelve months.
Months 1-2: assessment of processes, available data, organisational constraints. Identification of three priority use cases (demand forecasting, order optimisation, predictive expiry).
Months 3-4: technology partner selection, architecture definition, contracts, governance.
Months 5-9: development in two-week sprints, testing in two pilot stores, iteration.
Months 10-12: rollout to 200 stores, training, impact measurement.
Final outcome: -23% waste against benchmark. Positive ROI after 8 months. Programme extended to 3 additional areas.
My role? Holding together every month all those parts that, alone, would never have spoken to each other at the necessary speed.