VP, Operations and AI Enablement

Vice President, Business Operations & AI Enablement

Reports to:

Chief Executive Officer |

Location:

Houston, TX (preferred)

We are seeking a Vice President of Business Operations & AI Enablement, a builder who turns business problems into working AI-enabled systems in weeks rather than quarters. This is a hands-on role with a wide, cross‑functional remit. You will take a problem from any part of the business, whether commercial and business development, property accounting, human resources, transitions, or corporate operations, prototype the solution with modern AI tooling, prove it against real company data, and hand it off to the function that will own it.

This role partners closely with the Chief Transformation Officer and technology leadership, who own the company's AI strategy, technology organization, and data platform, and works alongside the Chief of Staff as a peer. Success is measured concretely: working systems in production, used daily, with a credible line to capacity released or revenue created.

• Identify, scope, and personally build AI-enabled workflows and internal tools that remove manual effort from the business, working in modern AI development environments rather than a traditional development queue.
• Move from problem statement to working prototype in days or weeks, tested against real company data, iterating directly with the users who will live with the result.
• Partner with the technology organization to harden, integrate, secure, and support anything that graduates from prototype to production.
• Instrument every build with a baseline, a measure, and an honest read on whether it is actually being used.
• Document how work actually gets done across functions in scope, and identify where handoffs, rework, and manual reconciliation consume capacity.
• Distinguish problems that automation solves from problems that require a process, training, or organizational fix.
• Translate between operators who know the business and technologists who know the systems.
• Close the gap between AI tools deployed and AI tools actually used, driving genuine daily adoption among analysts, accountants, and business development staff.
• Build and run practical enablement - office hours, working sessions, internal prompt libraries, and worked examples drawn from the company's own processes.
• Develop internal power users in each function who can build for themselves, rather than centralizing all demand in this role.
• Maintain a live, honestly ranked view of automation opportunities across the business, sized by effort, data readiness, and value, and bring that view to the CEO and leadership team on a standing basis.

• 8-15 years running or improving operations in a complex, multi-site, people-heavy business; has owned a process, a P&L line, or a function.
• Has personally built working things with modern AI tooling (agents, internal applications, data pipelines, automations) and can speak credibly about what they built, what broke, and what they'd do differently. Strategy decks, vendor selection, or pilot governance alone are not a fit.
• Comfortable turning an idea into something real over a weekend and presenting it to a skeptical operator on Monday; works well in ambiguity, without a team beneath them, and without an established process.
• Able to decompose a messy operational problem, get to the data, and reach a defensible answer - equally comfortable in a spreadsheet, a database, or a conversation with a frontline operator about why a process broke down.
• Able to sit with a regional manager, an accountant, and a data engineer in the same afternoon and be taken seriously by all three.
• Knows when to stop: ships the version that solves 80% of the problem, resists building a…