AI Solutions Manager

mines; United States; Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Mines in Golden, Colorado is seeking an AI Solutions Manager to lead the AI opportunity intake, adoption, and value-realization efforts within the IT department. This hybrid role emphasizes cross-campus collaboration and speaking the language of both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

You will translate campus needs into AI use cases, coordinate with IT teams and campus partners, and drive governance, prioritization, and measurement of AI-enabled initiatives to deliver tangible outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary front door for campus AI opportunities, ideas, use cases, and requests from academic, administrative, research, and operational units.
• Build and maintain an organized AI opportunity pipeline that captures request details, business needs, expected outcomes, stakeholders, readiness factors, dependencies, risks, and status.
• Meet with campus partners to understand pain points, opportunities, goals, current processes, service impacts, customer needs, and potential value of AI-enabled solutions.
• Shape early ideas into clear, actionable use cases that can be evaluated by the AI Acceleration team and institutional decision-makers.
• Assess incoming opportunities for institutional alignment, business value, feasibility, urgency, complexity, risk, readiness, data needs, governance considerations, accessibility, privacy, security, and sustainability.
• Develop prioritization recommendations for review by the Director of AI Acceleration and appropriate governance or leadership groups.
• Identify requests that should move forward as AI projects, requests that need additional discovery, requests that are better addressed through training or process improvement, and requests that should be deferred or declined.
• Partner with the Senior Project Manager to transition approved AI opportunities into structured project planning and delivery processes.
• Track the AI opportunity pipeline and prepare summaries, dashboards, presentations, or decision-support materials for leadership, governance groups, and stakeholders.
• Evaluate potential solution approaches, including AI-enabled solutions, enterprise applications, workflow automation, process improvements, vendor products, and existing technology capabilities, to help identify practical and sustainable paths forward.

Job description

Engineering a world of possibilities Join Mines in a new AI Solutions Manager position!

The AI Solutions Manager is a member of the AI Acceleration team within the Information Technology department at Mines and serves as the primary customer-facing intake, engagement, adoption, and value-realization lead for agentic AI opportunities. This role manages the AI solution lifecycle from idea intake through use-case development, prioritization, implementation readiness, adoption planning, change management, feedback collection, and outcome measurement.

Working closely with IT teams, and campus partners, the AI Solutions Manager helps departments identify meaningful opportunities to use agentic AI to improve academic, administrative, research, and operational outcomes. This role translates campus needs into clear AI use cases, assesses value and readiness, coordinates stakeholder alignment, and helps ensure that AI work is prioritized, adopted, and measured in a responsible and sustainable way.

This is a high-visibility individual contributor role that requires strong relationship-building, analytical judgment, change management experience, business acumen, and the ability to communicate clearly with technical and non-technical audiences. The AI Solutions Manager does not manage people; the role manages the AI opportunity pipeline, campus engagement process, adoption lifecycle, and value-realization activities for AI-enabled solutions.

This position currently operates in a hybrid work model with regular campus presence required. Work arrangements are subject to change based on institutional needs. The successful candidate must be able to commute to campus in Golden, Colorado.

Visa sponsorship is not available for this position now nor in the future.

Primary Responsibilities

AI OPPORTUNITY INTAKE, PIPELINE MANAGEMENT, AND PRIORITIZATION SUPPORT

• Serve as the primary front door for campus AI opportunities, ideas, use cases, and requests from academic, administrative, research, and operational units.
• Build and maintain an organized AI opportunity pipeline that captures request details, business needs, expected outcomes, stakeholders, readiness factors, dependencies, risks, and status.
• Meet with campus partners to understand pain points, opportunities, goals, current processes, service impacts, customer needs, and potential value of AI-enabled solutions.
• Shape early ideas into clear, actionable use cases that can be evaluated by the AI Acceleration team and institutional decision-makers.
• Assess incoming opportunities for institutional alignment, business value, feasibility, urgency, complexity, risk, readiness, data needs, governance considerations, accessibility, privacy, security, and sustainability.
• Develop prioritization recommendations for review by the Director of AI Acceleration and appropriate governance or leadership groups.
• Identify requests that should move forward as AI projects, requests that need additional discovery, requests that are better addressed through training or process improvement, and requests that should be deferred or declined.
• Partner with the Senior Project Manager to transition approved AI opportunities into structured project planning and delivery processes.
• Track the AI opportunity pipeline and prepare summaries, dashboards, presentations, or decision-support materials for leadership, governance groups, and stakeholders.
• Evaluate potential solution approaches, including AI-enabled solutions, enterprise applications, workflow automation, process improvements, vendor products, and existing technology capabilities, to help identify practical and sustainable paths forward.

CAMPUS ENGAGEMENT, PARTNERSHIP, AND AI CONSULTING

• Establish and maintain trusted relationships with campus departments, faculty, staff, administrative leaders, researchers, IT teams, and other stakeholders interested in AI-enabled solutions.
• Serve as a consultative partner to departments by helping them understand how AI may support business process improvement, service delivery, operational efficiency, productivity, decision support, and customer experience.
• Facilitate discovery conversations, stakeholder workshops, interviews, listening sessions, demonstrations, and other engagement activities to understand needs and align expectations.
• Translate campus needs and user perspectives into clear narratives, business cases, use-case summaries, stakeholder impacts, adoption considerations, and success measures.
• Help departments understand responsible AI expectations, approved tools, data handling considerations, governance requirements, and appropriate use boundaries.
• Partner with AI Solutions Architects to ensure campus needs are clearly understood before technical design, prototyping, or implementation begins.
• Support communication between technical teams and campus partners so that AI concepts, solution options, tradeoffs, constraints, and decisions are understandable to non-technical audiences.
• Identify opportuniti