Executive AI Innovation Leader

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an Executive Innovation Lead to drive high-impact engagements with CEOs and senior leaders in San Francisco. You will shape opportunities in AI, guide multidisciplinary pods, and transform insights into concrete directions and initiatives.

The role requires strategic judgment, executive presence, and exceptional facilitation to move conversations from possibility to decision, balancing ambition with practical execution.

Qualifications

• Led innovation, strategy, transformation, design, or advisory work with CEOs and senior executives.
• Exceptional workshop designer and facilitator who can move a group from possibility to decision.
• Balance imagination with rigor and distinguish a promising idea from innovation theater.
• Bring structure to ambiguous problems without narrowing the opportunity too quickly.
• Collaborate fluently with technical teams without needing to be an engineer.

Responsibilities

• Lead innovation engagements with CEOs, executive sponsors, and senior functional leaders.
• Help customers identify where AI could create new products, services, experiences, capabilities, or business models.
• Challenge conventional assumptions and explore possibilities beyond today’s processes and constraints.
• Design and facilitate executive workshops that move from exploration to clear choices and action.
• Turn broad ambitions into focused innovation questions and opportunities.
• Partner with researchers to uncover unmet needs, emerging behaviors, and signals of change.
• Guide designers and prototypers in making future concepts tangible through experiences, narratives, demos, and prototypes.
• Connect new ideas to customer value, business impact, operating-model change, governance, and technical feasibility.
• Lead multidisciplinary pods with clear roles, decisions, and handoffs.
• Build executive narratives, opportunity portfolios, roadmaps, and near-term experiments.
• Create conditions for productive disagreement, bold thinking, and practical decision-making.
• Turn lessons from engagements into reusable innovation methods, tools, and playbooks.

Skills

Executive leadership

Workshop design & facilitation

Strategic judgment

Executive presence

Cross-functional collaboration

Problem framing

Job description

OpenAI is seeking an Executive Innovation Lead to drive high-impact engagements with CEOs and senior leaders in San Francisco. You will shape opportunities in AI, guide multidisciplinary pods, and transform insights into concrete directions and initiatives.

The role requires strategic judgment, executive presence, and exceptional facilitation to move conversations from possibility to decision, balancing ambition with practical execution.