Industrial AI Forward Deployed Strategist

About the Industrial AI Forward Deployed Strategist Role

As an Industrial AI Forward Deployed Strategist, you are the product manager and strategic architect for complex client engagements. You define what should be built and why, based on deep manufacturing context and a working understanding of what AI can do today.

This is not an advisory role. You will be on factory floors, in front of C-suite executives, and building working solutions — often in the same week.

What You'll Do

• Develop deep understanding of each client's manufacturing operations, industry dynamics, and strategic objectives — starting on the plant floor rather than the data warehouse
• Define and prioritize use cases based on business value, technical feasibility, and strategic alignment
• Build working prototypes of dashboards, scripts, applications and validate ideas with real users.
• Design AI-powered workflows that operators, engineers, and executives will actually adopt
• Build trusted advisor relationships with C-suite executives, plant leadership, and operational stakeholders
• Navigate multi-layered organizational dynamics across operations, IT/OT, data science, and business intelligence functions
• Orchestrate delivery across parallel workstreams — owning project boards, reporting rhythms, and status meetings that keep everything visible
• Arbitrate scope and priority decisions, making explicit trade-offs based on business value and constraints
• Manage escalations and resolve the business and political issues that derail delivery
• Identify high-impact opportunities for predictive analytics, optimization, and intelligent automation, and partner with data science to design them
• Translate AI/ML concepts and value propositions for non-technical stakeholders
• Work with our Product team to scale what you build from one client into platform capability

How We Work

We build in public. Your work lives where teammates can find it — shared drives, project boards, open channels. When you learn something useful, you share it unprompted. When you're underwater, someone can step in because they can see what you were doing. Nobody here hides their secret sauce.

We put a stake in the ground. We commit to a date and work backward from it, rather than working on something indefinitely and reporting progress. Outcomes over activity.

We keep our promises. If you say you'll do it, it's as good as done — the small things as much as the big ones. And when something is going to slip, we say so before it slips, not after. That's how trust gets built with clients and with each other.

Qualifications

• 5–7 years of professional experience, with significant time in manufacturing operations, industrial technology, or manufacturing-focused consulting
• At least 2 years in a role that put you on a real plant floor on a weekly basis. How you got there matters less than what you learned there: that data is incomplete, sensors are fallible, tags are mislabeled, and the process on paper isn't the process running. 
• Able to build with AI. You don't need to write Python from scratch, but you do need to use AI tools to produce working artifacts — a script, a dashboard, a small application — that hold up well enough to be used by someone else. 
• Strong strategic thinking, with a track record of turning operational problems into solution strategies
• Exceptional communication skills across both technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience orchestrating multi-workstream projects with strong organizational and prioritization discipline

Also helpful, but not required

• Background in data science, industrial engineering, or operations research
• Hands-on experience with data platforms, analytics tools, or Industrial IoT
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure
• Enterprise-scale digital transformation experience
• Prior consulting experience at a top-tier strategy or technology firm

Travel

Up to 40% domestic and international travel to client offices and factory sites for workshops, stakeholder meetings, floor walks, and on-site strategic sessions. Frequency varies by client.