Strategy & Operations Manager

ai71; Abu Dhabi; On-site; AED 300,000 - 450,000; Full time

Job summary

ai71 is scaling its Ask unit and seeks an analytical operations professional to run planning cycles, budget and headcount planning, and performance analysis. You will turn complex questions into clear, actionable recommendations for the leadership team and boards.

You will research markets, size segments, and model economics of engagements, ensuring pricing and delivery reflect actual costs and margins. Strong business acumen is essential.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in strategy consulting, corporate strategy, business operations or a similar analytical role.
• Ability to build a model from scratch and present conclusions to senior stakeholders.
• Experience in technology, professional services or government/enterprise sales is a plus.
• Curiosity about AI and how markets evolve is encouraged.

Responsibilities

• Plan and run annual and quarterly cycles; set, track and review objectives.
• Build unit budgets with central finance and run headcount planning.
• Create evidence-based analyses for business reviews and decisions.
• Analyze deployment economics, margins and delivery costs by client and project.

Skills

Strategic planning

Business operations

Headcount planning

Budgeting

Financial modeling

Executive communication

Job description

About AI71:

ai71 builds enterprise-grade AI for the organisations that run the real economy: governments, banks and large enterprises across the Middle East & Africa. Our work is grounded in deep research and a commitment to deploying AI securely, responsibly and at scale.

“Ask” is our agentic AI platform. It puts AI agents to work on an organisation’s own knowledge, systems and workflows: agents that reason through complexity, draw on the organisation’s collective knowledge, and complete real work rather than just answer questions. Ask is built to be infrastructure and model-agnostic, so it runs inside a customer’s existing stack and security perimeter instead of forcing them onto ours. Today it is deployed across knowledge-heavy functions like legal, finance, HR and procurement, in some of the most regulated environments in the world.

The Role:

ai71 is scaling, and the Ask business unit is making bigger decisions than it has before: what we build next, which markets we go after, where the budget and the headcount should go, and which of our engagements actually make money. This role is the analytical and operational engine behind those decisions.

You will run the planning and performance cycle for the business unit, build the picture of how our client engagements actually perform, and do the research behind our bigger calls. You will work closely with the leadership team and get a lot of exposure to how the business is run.

What You’ll Do:

You will:

Planning and business operations

• Run our annual and quarterly planning cycles, including how objectives are set, agreed and checked in on.
• Build and track the business unit budget with central finance
• Run headcount planning: what we have, what we need, what it costs and when.
• Put together the analysis behind our business reviews, so that meetings start from evidence rather than opinion.

Engagement economics

• Build the economics of a deployment: what it costs us to win, deliver and support an engagement, and what we earn from it.
• Work out margin by client, project and use case, and make it visible in how we review the business.
• Understand what drives delivery cost, including deployment and engineering time, compute and inference, and ongoing support.
• Test whether our pricing reflects what delivery actually takes, and flag clearly where it does not.

Strategy and research

• Research the market and our competitors: who else is in this space, what they are doing, and what it means for us.
• Size markets and segments, and help work out who we should be selling to and in what order.
• Run build, buy and partner analysis when we need a capability we do not have.
• Bring customer and market evidence into decisions, including when it contradicts what we already believe.

Decision support

• Turn open, complicated questions into clear recommendations the leadership team can act on.
• Prepare material for group leadership and the board.
• Pick up the cross-cutting projects that matter and have no obvious owner.
• Keep the record of what we decided, why, and what happened next.

What You’ll Bring:

You bring 4+ years in strategy consulting, corporate strategy, business operations, corporate development or an adjacent analytical role. You are comfortable building a model from scratch and equally comfortable presenting the conclusion to a room of senior people. Experience in technology, professional services, or a business selling to governments and large enterprises is an advantage, particularly where delivery cost and margin were things you had to understand rather than assume. The role does not require a technical background, but you should be curious enough about AI to start forming your own view of where the market is going.

Beyond experience, here are the qualities we are looking for:

Ownership: you can take a vague question and turn it into a piece of work with a shape, an answer and a way of tracking it. You carry things through to the end rather than handing them on half-finished.

Rigour: your numbers hold up when someone pulls on them. You state your assumptions, you know where your data came from, and you say plainly when something is an estimate.

Practical: you can tell the difference between a question that matters and a question that is merely interesting. You go deep where it changes the answer and stop where it does not - and your work is built to be acted on.

Communication: you can take something complicated and make it clear to an executive in a page. The same clarity shows up in how you run a planning cycle and how you write up a decision.

Commercial curiosity: you want to understand how the business actually makes money, and you are interested in the answer rather than in producing the analysis.

We know many strong candidates won’t tick every box above. If your experience looks a little different but you believe you can bring value to this role, we would like to hear from you.

Why AI71:

Mission-Driven Work: Work on cutting-edge AI applications with a talented and passionate team, solving real-world challenges in critical sectors.

Unparalleled Opportunity: This is a chance to innovate and solve real-world challenges using AI at a company with unique access to world-leading models and resources.

Career Growth: We offer competitive compensation, benefits, and significant career growth opportunities as a foundational member of the team.

World-Class Environment: Enjoy a flexible working environment and the latest tools & technologies needed to do your best work.