Director, AI Strategy and Operations - Corporate Services; CSU

Position: Director, AI Strategy and Operations - Corporate Services (CSU)

Build the future, spark innovation and align your career with purpose.
McKinstry is innovating the waste and climate harm out of the built environment and creating lasting impact. Together, we’re building a thriving planet.
Buildings are a leading contributor to the climate crisis, generating nearly 40% of total global energy-related carbon emissions. We’re making a lasting impact on our industry and within our communities by addressing the climate, affordability and equity crises through:

• renewables and energy services
• engineering and design
• construction and facility services

To get where we’re going, we need big thinkers, problem solvers and collaborative mindsets. Does that sound like you?
The Opportunity with Mc Kinstry
Our team is seeking a Director, AI Strategy & Operations –
Corporate Services Unit (CSU) to join us in a hybrid role based out of our office in Seattle, Washington
. The individual assuming this role will own the AI use case portfolio for McKinstry's Corporate Services functions:
Legal, Finance/FP&A, HR, Marketing, and IT. They will also be accountable for connecting the pockets of active experimentation already underway in each function into a governed, sequenced program that delivers measurable outcomes within the current fiscal year. This role translates the enterprise AI foundation into operational value for corporate functions, operating at the boundary between what the program can build and what professional back-office teams can adopt.

This role is successful when CSU functions are measurably more efficient because of AI; fewer hours on contract review, faster FP&A analysis and automated workflows that free skilled professionals for higher-value work.
Responsibilities include:

• Owns the AI strategy and roadmap for Corporate Services — defining where intelligence creates the most value across Legal, Finance, HR, Marketing, and IT workflows, sequencing how McKinstry gets there, and ensuring AI investments build on the enterprise foundation rather than proliferating disconnected tools.
• Owns the AI use case pipeline for CSU: intake, evaluation, prioritization, and the GO/NO-GO decision; ensuring the contract review pilot, CBA orchestrator, AP invoice processing, HR screening, and FP&A early warning initiatives move from active experimentation into governed delivery without accumulating in a backlog.
• Builds the AI team's own operating model as the proof case for CSU, bringing our own team's operations to a standard worth copying, maintaining the single source of truth for the team's decisions, metrics and documents and developing that operating model into the template the role then takes to the other Corporate Services functions. We improve our own operations first, then lead the operations transformation for CSU.
• Runs the business review and performance measurement cycle. Prepares and runs the Monthly and Quarterly Business Reviews (MBRs and QBRs), runs the OKR cycle and measures the KPIs and captures the underlying detail so the numbers are defined, current and traceable. Maintains the settled-decisions record and the single open-items tracker and drives every commitment to a named owner and close date.
• Personally leads high-priority AI pilots end-to-end including the Contract/SOW review automation pilot as the anchor; from scoping and stakeholder alignment through execution, measurement, and the decision to scale or stop, owning outcome metrics for every pilot in the portfolio.
• Builds and runs the AI champion network within CSU to include recruiting, developing, and connecting legal counsel, finance analysts, HR business partners, and IT leads who beta test tools, give real feedback, and drive peer adoption across functions.
• Works directly with CSU function heads to identify where AI creates the most value in their workflows, co-designs solutions that fit how professional teams actually operate, and manages the particular change management challenge of gaining adoption among skeptical, risk-conscious professional audiences.
• Represents CSU Priorities in McKinstry’s AI governance forums, coordinates with the enterprise hub to stay aligned on foundation work and escalates when a…