Director of AI Innovation & Enablement

As a 2026 AdAge Best Places to Work company, Ars X Machina (AXM) is a full-service media planning, buying, and analytics agency headquartered in San Francisco, with a remote team distributed across the U.S. We craft omnichannel, data-driven media strategies that span the entire paid media landscape. From audience development and strategic planning to budget forecasting, execution, optimization, and reporting, we manage the full media lifecycle end-to-end.

Our experience spans both B2B and B2C, supporting brand-building and performance-driven campaigns.

What sets AXM apart? Our agility, strategic leadership, and innovative mindset, all rooted in a collaborative, people-first culture where both clients and team members thrive.

As Director of AI Innovation & Enablement, you’ll help lead Ars X Machina’s evolution from an AI-enabled agency to an AI-native one, where teams can securely query approved knowledge and data, automate work, and turn answers into better decisions and new ideas. You’ll evolve our current AI capabilities and lead the architecture that helps teams find efficiencies across paid media planning, activation, measurement, and operations, giving people more time to execute the highest-value work.

Those same capabilities will drive innovation through sharper strategies, new services, and proprietary solutions for clients.

This is a hands-on role. You’ll evaluate technology, configure AI assistants and agents, build automations, connect approved knowledge and data, and test outputs across approved AI platforms and systems. You’ll make those capabilities useful to teams through role-specific training, coaching, office hours, and playbooks grounded in real work, helping employees combine marketing expertise, AI, data, automation, and human judgment.

Working with the Leadership team, you’ll lead one AI roadmap across Media Planning & Investment, Analytics & Data Science, and Operations. You’ll use an Agile approach to prioritize initiatives, build and test with teams, learn quickly, and scale what works. You’ll guide responsible use and investment decisions while driving proven ideas into daily practice. Success will show up in stronger employee skills, sustained adoption, faster and higher-quality work, and new value clients can see.

• Translate agency and client priorities into a focused AI portfolio using Agile Scrum. Evaluate emerging AI, agentic, automation, martech, and data capabilities; separate practical opportunities from hype and recommend where AXM should experiment, invest, partner, or develop new capabilities.
• Manage intake, prioritization, pilots, rollout, measurement, and maintenance. Recommend platforms, investments, and sequencing, deciding what to test, scale, defer, or stop.

• Partner with Media Planning & Investment, Analytics & Data Science, and Operations to identify recurring work and test approved AI workflows for new business development, research, campaign builds, trafficking, pacing, optimizations, and reporting. Scale concepts across the agency after team validation of quality, usefulness, and risk.
• Identify opportunities for agents to coordinate multi-step media, measurement, and operational workflows across agency teams. Define autonomy limits, required human oversight, and standards for testing, monitoring, and maintaining agent-driven work.

• Build and maintain approved assistants, agents, and automations, with clear ownership, support, and cost controls.
• Make approved AXM knowledge and client data securely queryable, with appropriate permissions and answer validation.
• Partner with Leadership and the AXM…