Director, Enterprise AI Automation & Transformation

Description

About WAI

Since 1978, WAI has grown from an entrepreneurial start-up into a global aftermarket leader headquartered in South Florida. Nearly five decades of product knowledge, customer trust, and operational scale now support an ambitious growth agenda across distribution, manufacturing, product, customer, supply chain, and shared-service operations.

That scale creates a meaningful opportunity for practical enterprise AI. WAI is investing in AI, automation, data, and digital capabilities that can improve how work gets done: reducing manual effort, increasing speed and quality, strengthening decision-making, and helping teams serve customers more effectively.

About the Role

WAI is creating new enterprise AI capability focused on practical business impact: improving workflows, reducing manual effort, increasing speed and quality, supporting better decisions, and helping teams use AI-enabled tools responsibly.

The Director, Enterprise AI Automation & Transformation will be the business-facing leader responsible for building this capability from the ground up. This role leads the business side of a business-led, IT-governed operating model, shaping how WAI identifies, prioritizes, launches, governs, adopts, and measures AI-enabled use cases across business functions.

In this role, you will help WAI move from AI interest to AI operating discipline. You will build the repeatable model for finding the right opportunities, designing practical solutions, partnering with IT and technical resources, enabling business teams, and proving value through productivity, quality, speed, service, cost avoidance, and employee or customer experience improvements.

This is not a research lab role, a generic AI innovation role, or a pure platform engineering role. It is a hands-on enterprise transformation role for someone who wants to turn AI, automation, workflow redesign, and operating discipline into measurable business outcomes.

You will help define how WAI works with AI, not just which tools it uses.

Why This Role Matters

AI will create the most value at WAI when it is connected to real workflows, trusted data, clear controls, strong adoption, and measurable results.

In this role, you will help WAI move from AI interest to AI operating discipline. You will build the repeatable model for finding the right opportunities, designing practical solutions, partnering with IT and technical resources, enabling business teams, and proving value through productivity, quality, speed, service, cost avoidance, and employee or customer experience improvements.

What You'll Do

Lead WAI's enterprise AI program, including use-case intake, prioritization, roadmap development, governance routines, adoption planning, and ROI tracking.

Partner with leaders and process owners across functions such as Finance, Customer Service, Supply Chain, Sales Support, Operations, HR, Product/Catalog, Shared Services, and other areas to identify high-value AI and automation opportunities.

Lead discovery workshops, process reviews, and current-state / future-state workflow design sessions with business teams. Translate ambiguous business problems into clear use cases, requirements, controls, success metrics, and implementation plans.

Work closely with IT, data, security, AI platform resources, vendors, offshore or remote technical resources, and business users to ensure solutions are practical, secure, supportable, documented, and aligned with enterprise standards.

Define business requirements, acceptance criteria, approval steps, escalation paths, human-in-the-loop expectations, testing expectations, adoption plans, and benefit measurement for approved automations.

Support AI literacy, power-user enablement, training, change management, and adoption so teams can identify, use, and sustain AI-enabled workflows responsibly.

Track adoption, performance, quality, productivity impact, cost avoidance, service improvement, and realized ROI for deployed solutions.

What You'll Build or Own

You will build the operating model for enterprise AI adoption at WAI, including use-case intake and prioritization, value and feasibility scoring, process readiness criteria, workflow discovery and solution design standards, testing, monitoring, rollout, and adoption expectations, human review and escalation patterns, governance forums, ROI tracking, a practical roadmap of high-value opportunities, and repeatable ways for business and technical teams to work together.

You will lead the business side of a business-led, IT-governed model. You will not be expected to personally own enterprise AI platform architecture, model hosting, infrastructure, or system integration, but you will need enough technical fluency to partner effectively with the teams that do.

What Success Looks Like

• In the first 6-12 months, success looks like:
• WAI has a clear AI use case intake, prioritization, governance, solution design, testing, rollout, and ROI tracking process.
• A qualified pipeline of AI and automation opportunities has been built across business functions.
• A focused set of high-value pilots has been selected, launched, and measured.
• Early solutions are producing measurable outcomes in productivity, accuracy, speed, service, cost avoidance, or employee/customer experience.
• Business teams and IT partners trust the operating model because it balances speed, business value, risk management, controls, and enterprise standards.

Requirements

What We're Looking For

We are looking for a practical, business-facing AI and automation transformation leader who can operate in ambiguity, build from zero-to-one, and create measurable enterprise impact.

Strong candidates will bring experience in business transformation, process improvement, operations, automation, product management, consulting, enterprise technology-enabled change, or a related field.

You should have a track record of turning complex or ambiguous business problems into practical roadmaps, workflows, pilots, requirements, adoption plans, and measurable outcomes.

You should be comfortable working with senior business stakeholders, department leaders, managers, technical teams, vendors, and front-line users. This role requires executive presence, strong facilitation skills, clear communication, and the ability to build trust across functions.

You should have working fluency with AI and automation concepts such as AI agents, workflow orchestration, knowledge retrieval, prompting, human-in-the-loop design, testing, monitoring, adoption, and governance.

You should be able to partner with technical teams on data access, security, architecture, integrations, production release, and support models without needing to own day-to-day technical infrastructure yourself.

You should bring strong judgment about where automation creates value, where human review must remain in place, and how to balance speed, business value, risk, controls, and long-term scalability.

You should be energized by building standards while the capability is still evolving.

Nice-to-Have Experience

• Experience with enterprise systems such as ERP, CRM, customer service platforms, collaboration tools, knowledge repositories, reporting tools, workflow systems, or related platforms.
• Experience with tools or platforms such as Microsoft Copilot, Power Platform, Power Automate, Azure AI, Enterprise LLM tools, RAG frameworks, workflow tools, or similar technologies.
• Experience building or scaling a new capability, automation program, transformation office, AI governance forum, digital initiative, enterprise productivity program, or center of excellence.
• Certifications or formal training in project management, Lean / Six Sigma, product management, business process management, data analytics, AI, automation tools, or change management.

We know strong candidates may come from different paths, including transformation, operations, consulting, product, automation, data, enterprise technology, or AI implementation. You do not need to have used every tool listed here. We care most about your ability to translate business problems into trusted, adopted, measurable AI-enabled workflows.

Education and Experience

A bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Operations, Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, Data Analytics, or a related field is preferred. A master's degree, MBA, or equivalent senior leadership experience is a plus.

Significant experience leading business transformation, automation, AI-enabled workflow, enterprise productivity, operations improvement, product, consulting, or technology-enabled change initiatives is expected.

Working Model and Travel

This is an onsite, business-facing role that requires close collaboration with business users, functional leaders, IT, technical resources, vendors, and cross-functional project teams.

Travel of up to approximately 10-20% may be required for business meetings, site visits, workshops, discovery sessions, training, governance meetings, or implementation support.

Why WAI

• Growth and Scale - WAI combines the complexity of a global operating business with the opportunity to build new AI and digital capabilities from the ground up.
• Autonomy and Impact - These roles offer the chance to shape new capabilities, influence how teams work, and create visible business impact.
• Practical Innovation - WAI is focused on AI that improves real workflows, trusted data, productivity, quality, service, and operational execution.
• Global Business Context - You will work on challenges connected to products, customers, inventory, supply chain, manufacturing, distribution, and enterprise operations.
• Responsible AI Adoption - WAI is building AI capabilities with attention to governance, human review, data quality, security, adoption, and measurable value.

WAI is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to any characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.