Managing Director, AI Enablement – Hybrid AZ

Join BWH Hotels – Where Passion Meets Purpose

At BWH® Hotels, we don't just offer employment opportunities, we create opportunities to be part of something extraordinary. As a global leader in hospitality for nearly 80 years, our vision is to inspire travel through unique experiences. Joining our corporate team means becoming part of a dynamic and inclusive community that values innovation, collaboration, and making a meaningful impact in the travel industry.

Headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, BWH Hotels boasts a powerful portfolio of 18 brands, including WorldHotels™, Best Western® Hotels & Resorts, and SureStay Hotels®, with approximately 4,300 hotels in over 100 countries. We take pride in our top-ranking employee engagement scores and foster a workplace culture where your contributions truly matter. Join us and be part of a team that's shaping the future of hospitality!

Job Purpose

BWH Hotels is seeking a Managing Director, AI Enablement to direct the roadmap and end-to-end delivery of the AI initiatives across the organization.

The Managing Director, AI Enablement leads an AI architect and a small team of engineers,  directing technical execution against prioritized business outcomes. The role blends technical product leadership, program and project management, and business-relationship management — setting direction, driving prioritization and value-based trade-off decisions, and ensuring initiatives are delivered on scope, on time, and on budget while advancing the enterprise’s adoption of AI capabilities.

This is a technical, hands-on leadership role. It ensures the enterprise’s AI efforts are focused, prioritized, and value-driven; plays a key part in aligning AI initiatives across the organization; ensures AI is adopted consistently and effectively; and gives leadership clear visibility into AI’s impact — overseeing shared AI capabilities and responsible-AI governance.

Key Responsibilities

Product Strategy & Roadmap

• Direct the multi-year roadmap for AI initiatives across the organization.
• Develop a deep understanding of business goals, guest needs, and market and technology trends to inform priorities and proactively propose new solutions.
• Establish roadmaps and release plans that satisfy requirements and achieve measurable business outcomes; continuously monitor product performance and champion improvements.

Prioritization & Value-Based Trade-offs

• Drive prioritization and trade-off decisions tied to business value and return on investment.
• Align investment and team capacity to the highest-value outcomes; sequence and balance the backlog across competing demands.
• Manage investment decisions and product finances, maximizing value while minimizing cost, and surface trade-offs transparently to stakeholders.

End-to-End Delivery & Engineering Execution

• Own end-to-end delivery of key initiatives — from concept through launch, adoption, and value realization.
• Consult across teams to ensure use of AI is understood and aligned with Enterprise strategy and standards.
• Direct engineering execution against prioritized business outcomes; guide teams to scope, plan, and deliver work using agile methods and established best practices (e.g., reusability).
• Proactively identify and remove blockers, dependencies, and risks — including technical and resourcing challenges.
• Ensure alignment and adherence to enterprise architecture, security, compliance, and financial standards.

Project & Program Management

• Establish and maintain integrated delivery plans, milestones, and schedules across product owners and project managers.
• Manage scope, timelines, budgets, resources, dependencies, and risks across multiple concurrent initiatives.
• Apply consistent project and program management disciplines — intake, stage-gates, RAID (risks/assumptions/issues/dependencies) tracking, and status reporting — using enterprise roadmap and delivery tools.
• Report delivery status, risks, and outcomes to business stakeholders and technology leadership on a predictable cadence.

Business Partnership & Relationship Management

• Build trusted, executive-level relationships; understand the business strategy and translate it into a prioritized, well-shaped technology demand pipeline.
• Manage demand intake, challenge and refine requests, and connect business needs to enterprise capabilities and shared platforms.
• Own value realization — ensure delivered technology produces the intended business outcomes, and communicate that value back to the business.
• Manage expectations, resolve conflicts quickly, and act as the connective tissue across product, engineering, architecture, and the business.

Organization & People Leadership

• Recruit, develop, and retain top talent while building leadership depth and succession.
• Set clear goals and standards, create forums for feedback, and resolve conflicts quickly to minimize churn.
• Model enterprise collaboration across Technology and business functions.

Stakeholder Communication & Governance

• Provide executive-level updates on progress, outcomes, risks, and lessons learned.
• Define, track, and communicate relevant KPIs and OKRs that measure the product’s contribution to business goals.
• Represent the function in governance forums and steering committees, ensuring transparent, well-informed decision-making.
• Champion adoption and consumption of delivered product capabilities across the enterprise.

Function-Specific Priorities

• Mandate: Focus, align, and accelerate AI adoption across the enterprise — and lead the technical delivery behind it.
• Technical leadership & team: Provide hands-on technical leadership for the enterprise’s AI work, leading an AI architect and a small team of engineers who design, build, and deliver AI solutions; this role requires strong technical expertise.
• Enterprise AI alignment: Serve as the key point for aligning AI initiatives across the organization — connecting business and technology teams and concentrating effort on the highest-value, feasible use cases.
• Focused, prioritized, value-driven: Focus and prioritize the enterprise AI initiative portfolio, and establish governance, responsible-AI guardrails, and value tracking so leadership has clear visibility into AI’s impact.
• Staying ahead of AI change: Keep pace with the rapid evolution of AI and educate the organization on how other companies are applying AI and on new frontier models worth considering — translating the external landscape into practical opportunities for the business.
• AI for employee productivity: Lead the processes to embed AI into employee productivity — creating training and enablement programs and evaluating productivity tools (e.g., Copilot, Claude, and similar) for adoption across the workforce.
• Platform & build-vs-buy: Oversee shared AI platform capabilities and lead build-vs-buy decisions (e.g., LLM vs. ML, in-house vs. partner solutions such as Kore.ai).

Preferred Experience and Education

• Function focus: This role requires strong technical expertise. Experience leading AI/ML, agentic, or data product initiatives, hands-on experience with modern AI platforms and tooling, and experience with AI governance and adoption/enablement programs is strongly preferred.
• Bachelor’s degree in a related field, or equivalent experience; MBA or advanced degree preferred.
• 10–15 years of technology delivery experience.
• Demonstrated success owning end-to-end delivery of complex, cross-functional initiatives tied to business outcomes.
• Experience serving as a technology and business partner to senior executives.
• Strong command of agile delivery, product operating models, and roadmap/delivery tooling.
• Background in hospitality, travel, retail, or enterprise commerce/platforms preferred.

Required Knowledge and Skills

• Relationship building and collaboration across diverse, matrixed stakeholders and executive partners.
• Ability to surface, prioritize, and balance multiple stakeholder priorities.
• Strong project and program management skills across multiple concurrent initiatives and deadlines.
• Experience determining and overseeing software development initiatives and estimating resource requirements.
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills, leveraging data to inform decision-making.
• Strategic thinking and strong business acumen.
• Demonstrated success defining and building products and communicating complex technical information clearly to executives verbally and in writing.

Supervisory and Management Responsibilities

• Leads and manages an AI Architect and a small team of engineers who design, build, and deliver AI solutions; may also direct product owners and project managers assigned to AI initiatives. Provides input to — and/or make hiring, performance, and development decisions.
• Directs the work of engineering and cross-functional delivery resources through the product operating model.

Work Location and Schedule

This is a hybrid position, requiring onsite presence Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at our Global Operations Center, with the option to work remote on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This hybrid model fosters intentional collaboration, teamwork, connection, and productivity, while still providing flexibility and work life balance. The office address is 20400 N 29th Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona 85027.

This position is not eligible for immigration sponsorship. 

Benefits Summary for Full-Time Employees  

· Medical/Dental/Vision available day one 

· Vacation/Sick- accruals start day one 

· Paid company holidays and personal holidays to celebrate what’s important to you  

· 401K - company contribution and match (U.S.) 

· Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) – company contribution and match (Canada) 

· Employee discounts/hotel discounts 

· Free financial and health wellness programs 

· Tuition Reimbursement 

Equal Employment Opportunity

BWH Hotels (the "Company") maintains a policy of equal employment opportunity for all employees and qualified applicants for employment without regard to race (including hair textures and hair styles associated with race), color or pigmentation, religion, religious creed (including religious dress and grooming practices), national origin, ancestry, alienage or citizenship status, caste, age, disability, gender, gender identity or expression, sex, sexual orientation, LGBTQIA+ individuals, height, weight, pregnancy status, childbirth or related medical conditions, genetic information, uniformed service or veteran status, marital status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, provincial, or local laws. The Company’s equal employment opportunity policy applies to all aspects of employment with the Company, including, but not limited to, hiring, promotion, transfer, benefits, discipline, and termination.