Director - AI and Automation Practice

About the Role

We are looking for a Practice Director to lead our AI & Automation practice and drive the transformation of IT service delivery for both our existing customer base and new logos. This is a strategic, customer-facing leadership role at the intersection of AI, automation, and IT services — focused on helping enterprises rethink how IT is delivered, supported, and continuously improved through agentic AI, GenAI, and intelligent automation.

The successful candidate will be both an evangelist and an operator — capable of inspiring CIOs and IT leaders on the art of the possible, while also building the offerings, business cases, and consulting muscle needed to convert vision into measurable outcomes. You will own the practice's growth, build a high-caliber team of AI and automation consultants, and shape the firm's reputation as a thought leader in AI-driven IT services.

Key Responsibilities

1. Evangelism & Thought Leadership

• Serve as the firm's senior spokesperson on AI in IT service delivery — engaging CIOs, CTOs, Heads of Operations, and Transformation leaders across our customer base

• Lead executive briefings, customer roundtables, webinars, and industry conference sessions on topics spanning agentic AI for IT operations, AI-augmented service desks, autonomous SRE, AI-driven application support, and intelligent automation

• Develop and publish thought leadership — whitepapers, points of view, blog posts, podcasts, and analyst-facing content — that positions the firm as a credible authority

• Build internal evangelism programs that align Sales, Delivery, and Account leadership around the AI services narrative

2. Offering Development & Productization

• Build and continuously refresh a portfolio of AI and automation offerings tailored to IT service delivery, including: AI-augmented service desk ,AIOps and observability transformation (anomaly detection, predictive remediation, intelligent alerting) Intelligent process automation spanning RPA, workflow automation, and agent-based orchestration

• Define commercial models (outcome-based, gainshare, fixed-fee,)

• Maintain offering currency by tracking the AI tooling landscape, hyperscaler roadmaps, and competitive moves; refresh on a quarterly cadence

3. Business Case Development & Value Engineering

• Build robust, defensible business cases for AI and automation initiatives — quantifying ticket deflection, MTTR reduction, FTE optimization, productivity gains, cost-to-serve improvements, and customer experience uplift

• Develop a reusable value engineering toolkit including baseline assessment templates, ROI calculators, benchmarks, and outcome dashboards

• Partner with customer finance and procurement teams to structure commercial constructs that align value capture with realized outcomes (gainshare, success fees, consumption-based pricing)

• Build a library of customer case studies and proof points that anchor business cases in real, achieved results

4. Customer Engagement & Solutioning

• Lead high-stakes customer engagements from discovery through solution shaping for existing accounts and net-new logos

• Personally engage with C-suite stakeholders to shape the AI agenda, anchor proposals, and win trust

• Lead AI & automation assessments — diagnosing the current state of IT service delivery, identifying high-value AI opportunities, and building prioritized transformation roadmaps

• Partner with Account Executives and Client Partners to convert advisory engagements into multi-year transformation programs

• Own the win-loss reviews and feedback loops that continuously improve our pursuit and solutioning approach

5. Practice Building & Team Leadership

• Build and lead a team of AI and automation consultants spanning principal consultants, solution architects, AI engineers, and assessment leads

• Establish hiring profiles, career pathways, and competency frameworks for the practice

• Drive certification and capability-build programs across GenAI platforms, agentic AI frameworks (LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, etc.), and major automation platforms (ServiceNow, UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Microsoft Power Platform)

• Foster a high-performance culture grounded in customer outcomes, intellectual curiosity, and intellectual honesty about what AI can and cannot do today

• Mentor next-generation practice leaders and senior consultants

• Set and track practice KPIs: revenue, margin, utilization, NPS, certification density, pipeline coverage, and offering-attached deal share

6. Pilots, Proofs-of-Value & Innovation

• Run a structured PoV and pilot program that validates new AI and automation offerings with willing customers before broader productization

• Establish 3-5 lighthouse engagements per year that become reference-able transformation stories

• Build a fast-fail innovation pipeline that incubates emerging ideas — agentic workflows, multi-agent systems, AI-native service management — and graduates the best ones into productized offerings

• Maintain a working knowledge of the AI tooling landscape and validate emerging tools through hands-on pilots

Salary Range

$153,520.00 - $242,400.00 USD (Salary)

• Please note that the salary information provided herein is base pay only (gross); it does not include other forms of compensation which may or may not apply to this specific position, namely, performance-based bonuses, benefits-related payments, or other general incentives - none of which are guaranteed, may be subject to specific eligibility requirements, and are wholly within the discretion of Astreya to remit.
• Further, the salary information noted above is a range that consists of a minimum and maximum rate of pay for this specific position. Where an applicant or employee is placed on this range will depend and be contingent on objective, documented work-related considerations like education, experience, certifications, licenses, preferred qualifications, among other factors.

Astreya offers comprehensive benefits to all Regular, Full-Time Employees, including:

• Medical provided through UHC (PPO, HSA, Surest options) / Medical provided through Kaiser (HMO option only) for California employees only

• Dental provided through UHC

• Nationwide Vision provided by UHC

• Flexible Spending Account for Health & Dependent Care

• Pre-Tax Account for Commuter Benefit/Parking & Transit (location-specific)

• Continuing Education and Professional Development via various integrated platforms, e.g. Udemy and Coursera

• Corporate Wellness Program provided by Goomi Group

• Employee Assistance Program

• Wellness Days

  401k Plan

• Basic and Supplemental Life Insurance

• Short Term & Long Term Disability

• Critical Illness, Critical Hospital, and Voluntary Accident Insurance

• Tuition Reimbursement (available 6 months after start date, capped)

• Paid Time Off (accrued and prorated, maximum of 120 hours annually)

• Paid Holidays

• Any other statutory leaves, paid time, or other ancillary benefits required under state and federal law