Managing Director, AI Enablement – Hybrid AZ

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At BWH® Hotels, we don't just offer employment opportunities, we create opportunities to be part of something extraordinary. As a global leader in hospitality for nearly 80 years, our vision is to inspire travel through unique experiences. Joining our corporate team means becoming part of a dynamic and inclusive community that values innovation, collaboration, and making a meaningful impact in the travel industry.

Headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, BWH Hotels boasts a powerful portfolio of 18 brands, including WorldHotels™, Best Western® Hotels & Resorts, and SureStay Hotels®, with approximately 4,300 hotels in over 100 countries. We take pride in our top-ranking employee engagement scores and foster a workplace culture where your contributions truly matter. Join us and be part of a team that's shaping the future of hospitality!

Job Purpose

BWH Hotels is seeking a Managing Director, AI Enablement to direct the roadmap and end-to-end delivery of the AI initiatives across the organization.

The Managing Director, AI Enablement leads an AI architect and a small team of engineers,  directing technical execution against prioritized business outcomes. The role blends technical product leadership, program and project management, and business-relationship management — setting direction, driving prioritization and value-based trade-off decisions, and ensuring initiatives are delivered on scope, on time, and on budget while advancing the enterprise’s adoption of AI capabilities.

This is a technical, hands-on leadership role. It ensures the enterprise’s AI efforts are focused, prioritized, and value-driven; plays a key part in aligning AI initiatives across the organization; ensures AI is adopted consistently and effectively; and gives leadership clear visibility into AI’s impact — overseeing shared AI capabilities and responsible-AI governance.

Key Responsibilities

Product Strategy & Roadmap

• Direct the multi-year roadmap for AI initiatives across the organization.

• Develop a deep understanding of business goals, guest needs, and market and technology trends to inform priorities and proactively propose new solutions.

• Establish roadmaps and release plans that satisfy requirements and achieve measurable business outcomes; continuously monitor product performance and champion improvements.

Prioritization & Value-Based Trade-offs

• Drive prioritization and trade-off decisions tied to business value and return on investment.

• Align investment and team capacity to the highest-value outcomes; sequence and balance the backlog across competing demands.

• Manage investment decisions and product finances, maximizing value while minimizing cost, and surface trade-offs transparently to stakeholders.

End-to-End Delivery & Engineering Execution

• Own end-to-end delivery of key initiatives — from concept through launch, adoption, and value realization.

• Consult across teams to ensure use of AI is understood and aligned with Enterprise strategy and standards.

• Direct engineering execution against prioritized business outcomes; guide teams to scope, plan, and deliver work using agile methods and established best practices (e.g., reusability).

• Proactively identify and remove blockers, dependencies, and risks — including technical and resourcing challenges.

• Ensure alignment and adherence to enterprise architecture, security, compliance, and financial standards.

Project & Program Management

• Establish and maintain integrated delivery plans, milestones, and schedules across product owners and project managers.

• Manage scope, timelines, budgets, resources, dependencies, and risks across multiple concurrent initiatives.

• Apply consistent project and program management disciplines — intake, stage-gates, RAID (risks/assumptions/issues/dependencies) tracking, and status reporting — using enterprise roadmap and delivery tools.

• Report delivery status, risks, and outcomes to business stakeholders and technology leadership on a predictable cadence.

Business Partnership & Relationship Management

• Build trusted, executive-level relationships; understand the business strategy and translate it into a prioritized, well-shaped technology demand pipeline.

• Manage demand intake, challenge and refine requests, and connect business needs to enterprise capabilities and shared platforms.

• Own value realization — ensure delivered technology produces the intended business outcomes, and communicate that value back to the business.

• Manage expectations, resolve conflicts quickly, and act as the connective tissue across product, engineering, architecture, and the business.

Organization & People Leadership

• Recruit, develop, and retain top talent while building leadership depth and succession.

• Set clear goals and standards, create forums for feedback, and resolve conflicts quickly to minimize churn.

• Model enterprise collaboration across Technology and business functions.

Stakeholder Communication & Governance

• Provide executive-level updates on progress, outcomes, risks, and lessons learned.

• Define, track, and communicate relevant KPIs and OKRs that measure the product’s contribution to business goals.

• Represent the function in governance forums and steering committees, ensuring transparent, well-informed decision-making.

• Champion adoption and consumption of delivered product capabilities across the enterprise.

Function-Specific Priorities

• Mandate: Focus, align, and accelerate AI adoption across the enterprise — and lead the technical delivery behind it.

• Technical leadership & team: Provide hands-on technical leadership for the enterprise’s AI work, leading an AI architect and a small team of engineers who design, build, and deliver AI solutions; this role requires strong technical expertise.

• Enterprise AI alignment: Serve as the key point for aligning AI initiatives across the organization — connecting business and technology teams and concentrating effort on the highest-value, feasible use cases.

• Focused, prioritized, value-driven: Focus and prioritize the enterprise AI initiative portfolio, and establish governance, responsible-AI guardrails, and value tracking so leadership has clear visibility into AI’s impact.

• Staying ahead of AI change: Keep pace with the rapid evolution of AI and educate the organization on how other companies are applying AI and on new frontier models worth considering — translating the external landscape into practical opportunities for the business.

• AI for employee productivity: Lead the processes to embed AI into employee productivity — creating training and enablement programs and evaluating productivity tools (e.g., Copilot, Claude, and similar) for adoption across the workforce.

• Platform & build-vs-buy: Oversee shared AI platform capabilities and lead build-vs-buy decisions (e.g., LLM vs. ML, in-house vs. partner solutions such as Kore.ai).

Preferred Experience and Education

• Function focus: This role requires strong technical expertise. Experience leading AI/ML, agentic, or data product initiatives, hands-on experience with modern AI platforms and tooling, and experience with AI governance and adoption/enablement programs is strongly preferred.

• Bachelor’s degree in a related field, or equivalent experience; MBA or advanced degree preferred.

• 10–15 years of technology delivery experience.

• Demonstrated success owning end-to-end delivery of complex, cross-functional initiatives tied to business outcomes.

• Experience serving as a technology and business partner to senior executives.

• Strong command of agile delivery, product operating models, and roadmap/delivery tooling.

• Background in hospitality, travel, retail, or enterprise commerce/platforms preferred.

Required Knowledge and Skills

• Relationship building and collaboration across diverse, matrixed stakeholders and executive partners.

• Ability to surf