Principal, AI Consultant

What you’ll do:

Principals connect our clients to unique perspectives and constructive disruption that inspire them to drive value continuously through their partnership with Softchoice. They co-create and deliver digital transformations built on deep customer knowledge and empathy and guide customers through the strategic, technical, financial, and cultural elements required to accelerate their journeys.

You will help clients at all stages of their AI journey, focusing on the big three cloud providers: Azure, GCP, and AWS. Your advisory will include co-building a vision, creating business cases that establish compelling ROI, surfacing use cases, assessing AI readiness, creating roadmaps, designing adoption plans, and maintaining alignment between consulting guidance and implementation.

Presales support

• Be an actively engaged leader and play a key role in the full lifecycle of client engagements.
• Work directly with existing and potential clients to develop and sell industry-leading AI Consulting engagements that drive service work towards AI engineering teams.

Engagement delivery

• Co-create, accelerate and deliver digital transformation and AI journeys built on deep customer knowledge and empathy.
• Facilitate workshops that connect customers to unique points of view and constructive disruptions from AI technologies across a broad spectrum of solutions.

• Discover, analyze and advise: create strong, ROI-focused business cases for AI initiatives.
• Enable stakeholders to make crucial decisions by providing direct advice to both senior leadership and counsel to technical stakeholders.
• Write directly actionable analysis and advisory reports and presentations that reflect clarity of vision and a strong sense of direction.
• Craft roadmaps and plans for client teams to deliver on the identified customer outcomes.

Research and Practice Development

• Interviewing Subject Matter Experts, finding and reading relevant literature in your assigned topic, and using the information gathered to generate insights.
• Keep a pulse on what’s happening in the AI market, including upcoming trends and best practices, in part to assist in your contribution of ideas to the building of effective engagement content.
• Cultivating insights into a framework or methodology and building supporting tools and resources for use in engagements by other consultants.

Cross-departmental collaboration & support

• Practice Development: Perform the role of a counsellor and coach; provide input and guidance into the staffing process.
• Be a connector and facilitator between consulting and engineering, knowing when to leave it to tactical execution and when to bring back the strategic brainstorming.
• Have a perspective that includes other teams and subject matter experts to address all aspects of a consulting initiative that can span different workstreams and expertise.

What you’ll bring to the table:

Our principals understand the industries and businesses of their customers and how Softchoice can accelerate their digital transformation journeys. This role requires strong financial and business acumen, technology and change management knowledge, and a principled approach to digital transformation challenges and opportunities.

You have excellent analytical, interpersonal, and creative skills and thrive at the intersection of business and technology. You are ambitious and enterprising, with strong leadership qualities and presence in the C-Suite. You enjoy working with both technical and non-technical groups.

As an active learner, you continuously seek out and catalogue patterns in business, technology, and in organizational cultures that will provide valuable insight and clarity to your customers. You have a growth mindset and enjoy combining familiar with unfamiliar technologies to craft novel solutions to the most challenging problems.

To be successful, you will need (The more of these, the better)

• Undergraduate degree required (business or technology preferred). An MA, MBA, or MSc beneficial.
• Certifications in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or other related IT or management consulting disciplines are considered valuable.
• Practical experience (10-15+ years) in business advisory and/or consulting within IT.
• Demonstrated practical experience for a minimum of 6 years, providing advisory services in the fields of Data & Analytics, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence
• Demonstrated knowledge and ability to navigate the solution landscape in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI.
• Presentation and facilitation experience demonstrated through prior client-facing engagements.
• A demonstrated ability to handle mission flexibility and clarify ambiguous client intents.
• History of gaining and maintaining trusted advisor status with management. Strong working relationships with the C-suite are considered beneficial.
• Some acquired experience and knowledge in supplemental technology capabilities:
  • Data Architecture, Security and data governance
  • Application Development and DevOps and MLOps practices
  • Knowledge of common data protection and privacy frameworks