Senior Manager AI and Innovation

Senior Manager AI and Innovation

Hiring Salary Range: $145,000 - $224,000

This position is a strategic and hands‑on leader responsible for advancing the organization’s use of artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and emerging technologies. This role accelerates business value through responsible AI adoption, governance, improved decision intelligence, and pragmatic innovation aligned with enterprise strategy. This role leads Tri‑State’s AI program — including strategy, governance, solution delivery, and enterprise adoption — ensuring capabilities support operations, energy markets, member services, and corporate functions.

This role reports to the Chief Information & Technology Officer (CITO) and collaborates across the enterprise to ensure AI and innovation initiatives are ethical, secure, and generate measurable business impact.

• AI Strategy & Innovation Leadership
• Develop and maintain AI & Innovation strategy and roadmap aligned with corporate strategy, operational priorities, and the AI Governance Program.
• Accelerate innovation by building and maintaining a vision for how AI will drive value aligned with strategic objectives through collaboration with Tri‑State business units.
• Work with business units to identify, evaluate, and prioritize high value AI use cases.
• Champion emerging technologies such as GenAI, decision intelligence, autonomous agents, advanced analytics, intelligent automation, workforce augmentation technologies where they produce business value.
• Maintain awareness of regulatory, utility sector, and North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC)/Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) appropriate obligations for AI usage.
• AI Governance and Risk Management
• Chair the AI Council. Develop and maintain responsible AI policies and governance programs to address AI’s unique regulatory and compliance requirements while ensuring appropriate audit and risk controls.
• Establish effective collaboration between security, risk, compliance, legal, human resources, safety, and other stakeholders to rapidly adapt practices as necessary.
• Solution Delivery & Technical Leadership
• Manage the AI portfolio and AI initiatives, overseeing the allocation of resources for both current AI portfolios and long‑term AI capabilities and establish evaluation and management practices to estimate, measure, and foster accountability for business value and return on investment of AI initiatives.
• Define and update the operating model and delivery capabilities to engineer and operationalize AI initiatives, overseeing the development and execution of advanced AI products and solutions, ensuring their scalable and seamless integration across the organization.
• Lead the strategy and recommendations for build, buy, and blend decisions. Steward AI architectures and the selection of AI platforms and technologies.
• Ensure AI solutions integrate properly with core platforms and operational systems and technologies.
• Enterprise Change, Culture & Adoption
• Drive AI readiness and literacy across the organization, including partnering with Learning and Design for training, assisting with communication plans, and leading change management strategies.
• Foster cross‑functional coordination to align AI initiatives across business units ensuring maximum value realization, minimizing conflicting implementations, and effectively communicating complex AI topics to various stakeholders.
• Leadership, Stakeholder Engagement & Vendor Management
• Understand and embrace the tenants of the annual Business Plan, and ensures adherence to enterprise vision, mission, values, strategies, goals, objectives and priorities.
• Lead and mentor a small, multidisciplinary team (data scientists, software engineers, etc.).
• Manage external vendors, consulting partners, and technology providers, ensuring value alignment and responsible scaling.
• Build strong relationships with business unit leaders to drive collaborative innovation and solution co‑design.
• Effectively lead through change and adversity and demonstrates the ability to successfully resolve issues as they arise.
• Managerial Responsibilities:
• Ensure that training and development…