Director, AI Commercial Business Partner

ASTRAZENECA UK LIMITED; Hartford; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

ASTRAZENECA UK LIMITED is seeking an AI Commercial Leader to drive the translation of business needs into scalable AI programs across regions. You will own AI strategy, manage roadmaps, and partner with enterprise teams to deliver value and adoption at scale.

Role requires strong stakeholder engagement, governance, and the ability to connect business priorities with AI delivery teams. This includes end-to-end lifecycle management from ideation through deployment and decommissioning, with hybrid

Qualifications

• Experience translating business needs into AI use cases.
• Proven ability to manage multi-region AI programs.
• Strong governance and compliance mindset.
• Excellent stakeholder engagement and change leadership.

Responsibilities

• Strategy and portfolio ownership of new AI Commercial programs in partnership with the business teams.
• Single point of contact for AI Commercial capabilities programs for the Region, with AI roadmaps and use cases.
• Translate needs into AI use cases with clear metrics and requirements aligned to strategy.
• Oversee delivery, scale, adoption and value tracking of AI initiatives with evidence frameworks.
• Drive change management and governance to embed AI into operations at scale.
• Own full lifecycle of AI solutions from ideation to decommissioning.

Skills

AI strategy

Strategy & portfolio

Stakeholder management

Change management

Bilingual business/tech

Delivery lifecycle

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Graduate degree (MBA, Masters, MD or PhD preferred)

Job description

At AstraZeneca, we are proud of our ground-breaking pipeline and continue to look for new ways to bring the best medicines to patients. We are building and fostering high-performing collaborative teams across the organization to help us deliver on our ambition. There's no better time to join our global, growing enterprise as we lead the way for patients, healthcare and broader society. AI Commercial Team (AIC): The AI Commercial team, is part of the newly founded Enterprise AI team (EAI), delivering AI strategy and coordinated commercial progress and programs, in close collaboration with our business teams, and in partnership with our enterprise teams. We lead cross-functional and commercial-wide initiatives to deliver transformative commercial value and ensure we are at our best in delivering lifesaving medicines to patients.

Oncology Business Unit (OBU) is responsible for the commercialisation of medicines across some of the most hard-to-treat forms of disease, including: lung, breast, gastrointestinal, gynaecological, genitourinary and haematology cancers.

What you'll do

AI Commercial Business Leaders are the embedded "translators" between business functions and the AI Commercial organization, responsible for the success of AI programs. The role is strategically positioned in therapy areas, markets, and functions with the objectives to drive translation, adoption, and lifecycle management of AI solutions in the business. Key deliverables include translating business needs into well-scoped AI use cases and ensure each solution delivers measurable business impact. This requires you to be bilingual in business/science and technology, enabling you to connect domain priorities with AI delivery teams. You will be responsible for owning the full lifecycle of AI solutions - from ideation through delivery, adoption, and decommissioning - and are accountable for driving real, sustained value and reuse. In this role, you will be responsible for building the bridge between business teams at a Region and Market level, and technical experts within the AIC and EAI function as well as key other Enterprise technology teams such as Commercial IT and Global Business Services. As part of this role, you will champion the key commercial AI programs in service of enhancing customer engagement, powered by actionable AI insights, delivered thought agentic platforms. In addition, you will partner on the delivery of AI capability building programs. To do this successfully, you will share geographic location with the respective Region team, have a seat at the Senior leader table for the Region, with connection further enhanced through dotted line reporting to the Region, while sitting on the AIC Leadership team reporting to VP AIC.

Responsibilities include

• Strategy and portfolio ownership of new AI Commercial programs for in partnership with the business teams.
• Single point of contact and responsible for engagement for AI Commercial capabilities programs for the Region, maintaining AI roadmaps aligned with business needs, developing business cases in partnership with the business, and promoting reuse principles.
• Translation of needs into AI use cases: Engaging with stakeholders to identify unmet needs and translating these into well-defined AI use cases with clear metrics and requirements and a clear alignment with business strategy and AI30 focus areas.
• Delivery, scale, adoption and value tracking of AI initiatives: co-leading solution delivery, overseeing lifecycle management including pilot shaping, deployment, adoption, and value realization, while ensuring appropriate evidence frameworks are applied.
• Change management and governance: Acting as change leaders embedding AI into operations, support AI literacy, and ensure data governance and compliance with standards and regulations, while collaborating with internal and external partners to drive commercial success at scale.
• Translating business needs into well-scoped AI use cases and ensuring each solution delivers measurable business impact. This requires you to be bilingual in business and technology, enabling you to connect domain priorities with AI delivery teams. Owning the full lifecycle of AI solutions - from ideation through delivery, adoption, and decommissioning.
• Spot and shape new enterprise initiatives by scanning internal/external trends and partnering with functional leaders.
• Track industry, market and innovation shifts to anticipate opportunities and risks.
• Lead change through structured stakeholder engagement, aligning perspectives and guiding teams through uncertainty.
• Define KPIs and monitoring to evaluate progress and pivot when needed.

Typical Accountabilities include

• AI Strategy and portfolio ownership
• Serve as the single business owner for AI solutions in their therapy area, market, or function.
• Maintain and sequence a clear AI roadmap aligned to business, medical, access, and R&D priorities.
• Develop business cases and value narratives to support prioritization decisions.
• Embed reuse principles ("build or buy once, scale to many") when defining and shaping demand.
• Translation of needs into AI use cases
• Engage business leaders and cross-functional teams to surface unmet needs and decision points where AI can drive new outcomes.
• Translate needs into well-scoped AI use cases with clear problem statements, success metrics, data requirements, and risk tiering.
• Act as bilingual translators connecting business priorities, scientific context, and technology capabilities.
• Delivery, scale, adoption and value tracking
• Co-lead delivery with enterprise AI teams to ensure solutions fit real workflows and local systems.
• Own the full AI Program lifecycle, including:
• Pilot shaping
• Scaled deployment
• Local adoption and change readiness
• Tracking of adoption KPIs
• Outcome and ROI realization
• Remediation or decommissioning when needed
• Ensure correct evidence frameworks are applied to measure value.
• Change management and ways of working
• Act as change leaders for AI, embedding new practices into day-to-day operations - avoiding one-off pilots that don't inform or lead to a scaled solution
• Identify required process and role shifts and work with functional leaders to implement them, in order to advance adoption of AI solutions.
• Support AI literacy and upskilling by partnering with the AITO team and HR on targeted learnings.
• Data, governance and compliance point of contact for the Oncology Business Unit Europe & Canada region
• Partner with Enterprise Demand Excellence (EDE) and AITT to ensure data used in solutions is AI-ready and compliant with enterprise standards (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, AI act, SAMd).
• Ensure each AI use case follows the enterprise governance framework, including:
• Registry-before-scale
• Model and data cards
• Ongoing monitoring
• Human-in-the-loop oversight when required
• Ensure AI solutions align with quality, legal, compliance, PV and safety requirements, and local codes.
• Deliver Partnership and ecosystem
• Clear co-development of AI programs and delivery plans, ensuring business maintains sponsorship and ownership from inception to delivery and scaling.
• Develop clear and deep delivery relationships with Commercial AI and Global Business Services teams. Drive focus across business and enterprise teams to establish clear and mutually aligned remits for coordinated delivery of AI programs
• Build a culture of coordinated delivery with pride, shared purpose and celebration. Supporting a culture of co-delivery and ability to raise and address concerns in a psychologically safe environment.
• Integration with enterprise AI organization
• Act as the primary interface between your business area and CAI Capability teams (Customer and Patient Engagement, Commercial DS&AI) and Enterprise AI teams (i.e., AISI, AITC, AICA, AIEI, AITT, EDE), ensuring clarity on ownership, priorities and hand-offs.

Desirable for the Role

• Graduate degree (MBA, Masters, MD or PhD preferred)
• Experience in leading and managing alliances or strategic partnerships
• Experience in translating business needs into a coordinated business proposal and plan for cross-functional senior leadership team
• Ability to develop creative and simple solutions to complex problems

When we put unexpected teams in the same room, we unleash bold thinking with the power to inspire life-changing medicines. In-person working gives us the platform we need to connect, work at pace and challenge perceptions. That's why we work, on average, a minimum of three days per week from the office. But that doesn't mean we're not flexible. We balance the expectation of being in the office while respecting individual flexibility. Join us in our unique and ambitious world.