AI Delivery Lead Role

AI Delivery Lead - Enterprise AI & Transformation (Permanent)

AI, Data & Digital Delivery | Auckland, New Zealand

The Client

Our client is a well-established New Zealand Financial Services organization with a strong digital reputation and a growing portfolio of financial products used by Kiwi’s all over the country, including through bank and partner channels. They’ve already taken AI out of the pilot stage and into everyday frontline use. Now they’re scaling it into claims and underwriting, and they need someone to own delivery so the AI team can stay focused on building. Our client has moved into the building phase of an ‘Onthology’ so this is legitimate frontier work in the AI space.

The Opportunity

This is genuinely hands-on delivery leadership in a regulated environment. It’s not a role for someone who has only run traditional IT programmes, or who has only seen AI at demo stage. It suits a delivery or product leader who has taken emerging technology from prototype into production, and who knows what it takes to do that safely when risk, privacy and legal teams are in the room. This newly created role will suit someone who is deeply curious about how patterns (systems, people behaviours and thinking) work.

You’ll be the single point of delivery coordination across a multi-channel AI platform (web, messaging and voice) and the use cases that run on it, starting with claims and underwriting journeys. You’ll turn an agreed product roadmap into a delivery plan, keep engineering, data, architecture and the business moving together, and be the person who can tell a promising prototype from something ready to run on live customer claims. There will be opportunities that appear to be vague and almost hidden, those opportunities might not have the right voice or representative sponsorship but you will have an innate ability to see through all of that and then drive into a real-world offering.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Owning intake and prioritisation of AI use cases, and shaping them for value, feasibility, data readiness and risk.
• Turning product priorities into a delivery roadmap with clear milestones, dependencies and capacity.
• Coordinating product owners, business analysts, architects, platform and data engineers, testers and operations across multiple concurrent workstreams.
• Building the backlog and driving work through discovery, prototype, pilot, production and scale.
• Making sure experiments have clear hypotheses and explicit stop, pivot or scale decisions.
• Embedding responsible AI controls, evidence and go/no-go reviews with risk, security, privacy and legal.
• Managing delivery partners and vendors, and tracking cost, adoption and realised benefits with Finance.

What You’ll Bring

• Strong programme, product or delivery leadership across complex, technology-enabled transformation (8+ years).
• Proven experience taking AI, data or emerging technology from prototype into production and scaled use.
• Confident working in a regulated environment, with risk, security, privacy and legal teams as everyday partners.
• Enough technical fluency to challenge architects and engineers, and to spot when a prototype isn’t production-ready.
• Practical understanding of generative AI, agentic AI and automation delivery, including evaluation and monitoring.
• Experience with demand management, prioritisation, capacity planning and executive reporting.
• A self-starter who takes ownership of a problem and drives it to an outcome.
• Experience in insurance or financial services, and exposure to AWS and Snowflake, is strongly regarded.

Why Apply

• Genuinely rare opportunity to lead AI delivery in a New Zealand household brand name that’s already past the hype and into production.
• Real scope to shape how AI is governed and scaled, working directly with the Head of AI & Insights which means that you will have a voice at the table.
• A strong, collaborative team and a business that’s growing through new partner channels.

How to Apply

For a confidential discussion about this role, contact Adam Roi at Walkersmith or apply with confidence via Seek. We look forward to hearing from you. We are only considering candidates who are currently in New Zealand with a Valid Working Rights.