Interim Chief AI Officer — Integration (Business Services)

Keeping the service dependable while its foundations move

Changing a product and platform model is rarely the hard part. Doing it while clients and colleagues still depend on what the old model delivers is. The Interim Chief AI Officer takes executive authority, under the Regional President, for both at once: the shift in how AI-enabled products and platforms are built and run, and the reliability of everything people rely on in the meantime. That double brief colours every decision. A new model that outperforms in testing but has no rollback route is a liability. A platform consolidation that saves engineering effort but quietly moves outage risk onto a team that never agreed to carry it is not a saving.

The authority is genuine. The officer decides which AI and platform calls remain with leaders in each market and which are taken centrally, and fixes the proof a model or platform change must show before it earns budget or engineering time, and the controls it must then live under. Every inherited commitment is judged on its merits, and some will be stopped. Nothing will proceed that leaves a cost or a risk landing on nobody in particular, and investment cases that skip over uptake, technical dependencies or the cost of failure will be sent back. The officer also sets the leadership structure and settles disagreements between the Regional President and operating leaders, which in AI work tend to surface as arguments about who carries the risk when a model misbehaves in production.

Eighteen months measured in reliability, not launches

The first ninety days establish ground truth. With the Regional President, the officer should agree where AI and platform decisions sit, the reliability baseline against which every change will be judged, and which thresholds stay in local hands. A baseline matters more than it sounds: without one, every incident during a migration becomes a debate about whether things were better before.

By around month nine, the portfolio of AI use cases and platform commitments should have been sorted. Each will have been confirmed, held back or closed, and each will carry an accountable leader and the evidence behind the call. By month 18 the new product and platform model should be running dependably, model risk controls should have been tested under real load rather than on paper, and a successor should be ready to hold those controls without the interim in the room.

An AI leader who has changed platforms across borders

Your leadership record runs to organisations with revenue of $540 million and above, 2,000 people and operations in eight countries, and you bring experience of geographic expansion, digital transformation and turnaround. The combination matters. Expansion teaches how variation creeps in market by market; transformation, how to change a platform under load; turnaround, how to make the unwelcome call early rather than late. Risk judgement at level 4 is the centre of gravity, since much of the job is deciding which reliability risks are acceptable during transition and which are not. Alongside that, we expect level 3 in product delivery, in architecture that holds at scale and in the governance of data and AI. You can tell a market's genuinely needed exception from one that survives only through habit. You can put an unresolved reliability gap before the Regional President without letting it stall the migration. And you grow successors during the platform change itself, so the new model keeps running reliably after the interim leaves.

Selection moves quickly. The Regional President meets you first, confidentially and by video in week one, to hear how you would keep services reliable while the platform model shifts under them. The following week, week two, you return to the Regional President to tackle a live problem together as a working case. Week three takes you to the Investment Committee for a face-to-face discussion. Expect our view of each stage in writing no more than five working days afterwards.