Associate Director, AI Innovation & Customer Experience

Kyndryl; Liverpool; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 135,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Be Well program

Hybrid-friendly culture

Certifications with Microsoft, Google,

Job summary

Kyndryl is seeking an Associate Director of Customer Innovation & Design Leadership to drive end-to-end engagements, framing challenges and directing prototype work with multidisciplinary teams. This role bridges business problems, research insights, and tangible concepts for testing.

You will guide senior leaders through ambiguity, shape value hypotheses, and steer projects from discovery to funded sprints and enterprise transformation, leveraging practical AI fluency.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Design, HCI, Business, Engineering, Computer Science, Architecture, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years in design, innovation, or consulting, including 3+ years leading multidisciplinary teams and owning executive customer relationships.
• Proven portfolio of end-to-end innovation engagements, detailing challenge framing, prototyping, testing, and business outcomes.
• Executive presence and facilitation skills, with a track record of guiding C-suite stakeholders through complex co-design and decisions.
• Strong business acumen and human-centered design leadership spanning research, framing, validation, and live implementation.
• Practical AI opportunity fluency, with enough understanding of generative and agentic systems to direct credible prototypes.
• Multidisciplinary direction capability, aligning designers, researchers, engineers, and commercial teams around unified goals.

Responsibilities

• Own the customer journey, shaping brief arcs, success measures, immersion, co-design workshops, builds, and post-Lab follow-through.
• Lead CIOs, CTOs, COOs, and senior leadership teams through ambiguity, constructive challenge, and strategic decisions.
• Translate enterprise priorities, user needs, and operational realities into clear value hypotheses and actionable design challenges.
• Define human‑AI system interactions—designing handoffs, exceptions, control, and accountability between people and agents.
• Direct multidisciplinary teams through focused prototype builds, setting fidelity and defining evidence using realistic scenarios and synthetic personas.
• Connect engagement findings and validation evidence to definitive executive recommendations and owned next steps.
• Turn validated work into reusable methods, patterns, prompts, agent states, policies, and reference builds.

Skills

Bachelor-level degree in Design / HCI

10+ years design/innovation/consulting

Executive stakeholder engagement

AI fluency for human‑AI systems

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Design, HCI, Business, Engineering, Computer Science, Architecture, or equivalent

Master’s degree or MBA

Tools

Figma

Miro

Job description

Kyndryl is seeking an Associate Director of Customer Innovation & Design Leadership to drive end-to-end engagements, framing challenges and directing prototype work with multidisciplinary teams. This role bridges business problems, research insights, and tangible concepts for testing.

You will guide senior leaders through ambiguity, shape value hypotheses, and steer projects from discovery to funded sprints and enterprise transformation, leveraging practical AI fluency.