Chief Scientist - Technical Artificial Intelligence

DESCRIPTION

The Chief Scientist-Technical Artificial Intelligence, serves as a global thought leader and hands-on innovator across the enterprise. This role is responsible for translating emerging AI research and trends from academia, national laboratories, and industry into practical, high-impact applications. The role also partners closely with internal teams and external software vendors to support negotiations, co-innovate solutions, and guide adoption of advanced AI technologies.

The Chief Scientist addresses a wide range of technical and process challenges across Product Development, Training and Upskilling, Software Solution Development, and end-to-end operational processes such as Product Problem Solving, Uptime, and Quality Engineering. As an enterprise-level individual contributor, this role drives the creation of new AI agents, tools, and applications; defines requirements for third-party builds; and establishes roadmaps for key technical capabilities.

Given the rapid advancements in Generative AI, the role will lead significant changes to existing procedures and establish entirely new workflows across procurement, training, cybersecurity, data privacy, and product development. This role is preferably based in Indiana, but remote arrangements are possible. The role operates globally, with particular focus on North America, China, and Europe.

• Serve as the enterprise’s senior technical authority for generative and agentic AI, setting the standard for technical rigor and shaping how the Technical Function understands, evaluates, and applies advanced AI capabilities.
• Define and evolve AI principles, reference architectures, and technical standards that guide safe, scalable, and robust AI adoption across complex industrial engineering environments and influence long-term technology strategy.
• Translate frontier AI research into practical, actionable guidance, identifying emerging methods and design patterns and ensuring Cummins remains on the leading edge of innovation.
• Drive and accelerate high-value engineering use cases by advising teams on applying LLMs, RAG, and agent-based systems, improving decision quality, and enabling new technical workflows.
• Evaluate and validate AI model performance and risks through stress-testing, failure-mode analysis, and domain-expert collaboration to ensure outputs are explainable, traceable, and decision-supportive.
• Build organizational capability and ensure responsible scaling by coaching practitioners, raising AI literacy, and providing senior oversight for pilots and early deployments to clarify where AI adds value—and where human judgment remains essential.

• Expert-level mastery of generative AI—including LLMs, RAG architectures, and agentic AI frameworks—to serve as the company’s primary technical authority and advisor.
• Strong communication and teaching skills to translate complex AI concepts into clear, actionable understanding for engineers, senior leaders and cross-functional teams.
• Ability to shape enterprise AI strategy by influencing technical standards, advising leadership on risks and tradeoffs, and guiding mid- to long-term adoption across Business Units.
• Depth in agentic AI design to define patterns, curate reusable frameworks, and determine when agentic vs. traditional analytic approaches are most appropriate.
• Leadership in validation and responsible AI practices—including stress-testing, hallucination mitigation, misuse risk assessment, and championing principled, domain-informed approaches.
• Strong external presence and credibility to help establish Cummins’ reputation in the AI space while operating as an enterprise-scale individual contributor who influences through expertise.

• Advanced academic or technical foundation in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related field (or equivalent industry experience), enabling rigorous understanding of AI methods in industrial contexts.
• Hands-on mastery of modern AI tool chains and ecosystem technologies, including model…