Senior Manager - AI and Data Lead (Consulting) in London

As a Senior Manager – AI & Data Lead, you will play a pivotal, hands-on role in shaping, delivering, and embedding AI and data capabilities across our financial services clients and within our growing consulting practice. You will work directly with senior stakeholders across the financial services industry, guiding them through AI adoption, providing expert challenge, and ensuring initiatives deliver measurable, sustainable value. This is a delivery-focused, partner-facing leadership role, that will see you contribute significantly to building and scaling Be's AI Consulting capability, helping define offerings, strengthen delivery approaches, and support the development of our growing team.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead AI, data, and analytics engagements with financial services clients, ensuring outcomes are practical, transparent, and aligned to business priorities.
• Act as a senior advisor to C‐suite, transformation leads, and business owners, helping them understand where AI creates value — and where it doesn’t.
• Shape AI-enabled operating models, use cases, and transformation journeys tailored to client context.
• Ensure initiatives progress beyond proof‐of‐concept into production, adoption, and measurable business impact.
• Deliver work with Be's trademark approach: collaborative, transparent, grounded in reality, and focused on sustainable change.

Building Be's AI & Data Capability

• Support the development and scaling of our dedicated AI Consulting practice in partnership with senior leadership.
• Contribute to evolving AI service offerings, delivery standards, frameworks, and accelerators.
• Create reusable assets such as templates, estimation tools, and playbooks.
• Upskill and mentor consultants, helping build AI literacy and capability across the firm.
• Contribute to learning pathways and internal capability building across Gen AI, ML, analytics, and automation.

Hands-on Execution & Problem Solving

• Work directly with business, operations, technology, risk and data teams to scope, test, and deliver AI solutions.
• Support the design of data foundations, ML Ops approaches, model lifecycle processes, and AI productivity tooling.
• Bring clarity and structure to ambiguous or emerging client challenges — a core part of Be's value proposition.

Commercial & Practice Growth

• Build trusted senior client relationships as a credible AI advisor.
• Identify opportunities for AI-led value creation and support proposals and client pitches.
• Contribute to go‐to‐market strategy and positioning of Be's AI, data, and analytics capabilities.
• Support thought leadership, client forums, and development of market-facing materials.
• Play an important role in the growth of the AI & Data practice, without holding Partner-level commercial accountability.
• Ensure AI and data initiatives comply with financial services regulatory expectations (e.g., model risk, privacy, operational resilience).
• Design proportionate governance and operating models suitable for FS environments.
• Champion responsible, explainable, and ethically grounded AI across Be and client organisations.

The Ideal Candidate

• Significant financial services experience, across transformation, digital, data, or AI programmes (essential); Experience gained in management consulting or advisory environment, with several years' worth of experience focused on AI, advanced analytics, ML, or Gen AI.
• Proven experience delivering multiple AI or data-led initiatives end-to-end.
• Advanced understanding of AI delivery realities: data readiness, model deployment, governance, ML Ops, and adoption.
• Technically fluent and able to credibly challenge delivery teams. (coding not required)

Areas of AI Expertise (several required)

• Generative AI and LLM-enabled solutions
• Predictive & prescriptive analytics
• AI use-case discovery and value assessment
• AI operating models, governance, and risk
• Responsible AI, ethics, and regulatory considerations

Ways of Working

• Pragmatic, outcome-driven, and focused on value.
• Comfortable working in smaller, agile consulting teams wearing multiple hats.
• Skilled at building trust quickly with senior stakeholders.

Leadership & Influence

• Operates confidently at Senior Manager level.
• Able to simplify complexity and communicate clearly to executives.
• Motivated by driving real change—not just producing deliverables.
• Entrepreneurial, ambitious, and keen to help shape a growing capability.

What Success Looks Like in 12–18 Months

• Launching 2–3 repeatable AI consulting offerings.
• Leading multiple AI engagements into production and real‐world adoption.
• Building a core AI consulting team with strong delivery foundations.
• Establishing Be as a credible, trusted AI advisor for senior financial services clients.

Why This Role Matters at Be

You will help shape how AI and data transform our clients — and how Be evolves as a consultancy. You will strengthen our position as a trusted strategic and delivery partner in AI and data. Build internal capability and future-proof our consulting offerings. Gain visibility, direct sponsor support, and the opportunity to help shape a fast-growing capability. This role offers a rare blend of leadership, delivery, client impact, and practice building, within a high‐trust, people‐first consultancy environment.

Be Shaping the Future UK is the UK subsidiary of Be Shaping the Future, a well-established pan-European management and technology consultancy. We work with our clients (predominantly global banks, payment providers and other financial institutions) to shape their future through our transformation and advisory consulting services. We work in partnership with our clients across retail and commercial banking, capital markets, cards and payments along with the risk, finance, compliance, IT and operations functions within their businesses. We help clients with: digital transformation, regulatory compliance advice, capital optimisation, product design and go-to market strategy, climate risk and ESG, programme delivery and data transformation. We are passionate about putting our people first and we are led by a CEO who truly believes in servant leadership, ensuring our employees have the tools, resources, training, development and support they need to succeed. We believe that our commitment to supporting our employees' personal and professional development creates a unique culture; one that cultivates enthusiasm, passion, energy and a high level of motivation, which ensures we deliver a high quality service to our clients. To help us grow, we are keen to attract new employees with the talent, passion, discipline, and energy needed to support our clients face the challenges of an increasingly complex and evolving world.