Head Of Ai Transformation

Job description

AI is going to fundamentally change how companies operate. At Chip, we don't want to bolt AI onto the way we work today – we want to use it to rethink how we operate, make decisions and scale.

We're looking for a Head of AI Transformation to work directly with our COO and leadership team to make that happen.

This role will sit at the heart of how Chip operates and evolves. Alongside driving our AI transformation, you'll work directly with the COO on our broader operating model – how the organisation is structured, how work flows across teams, how decisions get made, how priorities translate into execution, and how we create the operating leverage required to scale.

This is not an AI strategy role where success means producing a roadmap. And it isn't a traditional programme management role.

It's a business transformation and operating role, with AI as one of the most important tools available to you.

You’ll identify where AI, automation and changes to the way we operate can materially improve the business, turn those opportunities into executable initiatives and drive them through to measurable results.

You’ll work across every part of Chip – Operations, Customer Service, Finance, Risk & Compliance, Marketing, Product, Engineering, People and our leadership teams – looking horizontally across the organisation rather than optimising functions in isolation.

You’ll help us understand how work actually flows through Chip, where time and capacity are being consumed, where processes are unnecessarily manual, where ownership or decision‑making is unclear, where organisational friction is slowing us down, and where AI or changes to our operating model can enable us to operate faster, smarter and at greater scale.

Most importantly, you’ll make things happen.

What you can expect to be doing:

• Work directly with the COO on how Chip operates and scales. Help evolve our operating model as the business grows – looking at organisational structures, accountabilities, decision‑making, governance, ways of working and how teams interact across the company.

• Identify and solve cross‑business operating problems. Some of the biggest opportunities won’t belong to a single function. You’ll get underneath issues that cut across teams, establish what’s really causing them and drive the changes required to fix them.

• Improve how strategy turns into execution. Help create stronger connections between company priorities, functional plans and the work actually happening across the organisation – ensuring we can see where resources are being deployed, where delivery is off track and where leadership intervention is required.

• Drive operating leverage. Constantly look for opportunities to increase the amount Chip can deliver without proportionately increasing cost or headcount – through better processes, clearer accountability, technology, automation, AI and changes to how work is organised.

• Challenge organisational complexity. Identify unnecessary hand‑offs, duplicated activity, unclear ownership, excessive reporting, slow decision‑making and processes that have accumulated as the business has grown – and simplify them.

• Help the COO maintain a business‑wide view of performance and execution. Surface emerging issues, dependencies, capacity constraints and opportunities that might otherwise remain within individual functions.

• Lead selected COO‑sponsored strategic and operational initiatives. Where an important business problem or opportunity cuts across existing organisational boundaries, take ownership of getting it understood, structured and delivered.

• Own Chip’s business‑wide AI transformation programme, translating our ambitions for AI into a prioritised portfolio of initiatives with clear owners, milestones and measurable outcomes.

• Find the highest‑value opportunities across the business. Get underneath how teams actually operate, identify friction, manual work, duplicated effort and broken workflows, and determine where AI, automation or operating‑model change can create meaningful commercial or operational value.

• Turn opportunities into working solutions. Take ideas from discovery and business case through prototyping, implementation, adoption and measurement rather than stopping at recommendations.

• Build a clear transformation and AI value pipeline. Prioritise initiatives based on measurable business impact – including capacity released, cost avoided, revenue enabled, customer outcomes improved, risk reduced and speed increased.

• Redesign workflows, not just automate individual tasks. Look across functions and end‑to‑end processes to identify opportunities to fundamentally simplify how work gets done.

• Create visibility across the organisation. Help us use tools, data and AI to understand what teams are working on, where capacity is being deployed, what is blocking delivery and where intervention will have the greatest impact.

• Drive cross‑functional execution. Bring together Product, Engineering, Operations, Data and business teams to deliver transformation initiatives that don’t sit neatly within one function.

• Strengthen organisational accountability. Help ensure important cross‑functional initiatives have clear ownership, decisions are made at the right level and commitments translate into delivery.

• Build AI into the way Chip works. Challenge teams to consider AI and automation as a default part of designing new processes rather than something added afterwards.

• Develop scalable operating systems and workflows. Work with platforms such as Linear and other business tools to create greater transparency, stronger prioritisation and increasingly intelligent workflows across Chip.

• Use AI to transform management information and reporting. Reduce manual reporting, improve the quality and timeliness of insight and make it easier for leaders to understand what is happening across the business and where action is required.

• Improve the operating rhythm of the business. Help ensure leadership meetings, business reviews, planning and reporting processes are driven by high‑quality information, clear decisions and follow‑through rather than simply producing more meetings and reporting.

• Create the measurement framework for transformation. Establish baselines and track whether initiatives are actually delivering the productivity, financial and operational benefits expected.

• Drive adoption. Technology alone doesn’t create transformation. Work with teams and leaders to change behaviours, embed new ways of working and ensure new capabilities are actually used.

• Bring external thinking into Chip. Stay close to developments in AI, agentic workflows, automation and emerging operating models, and rapidly translate relevant developments into practical opportunities for Chip.

• Be a constructive agitator. Challenge existing processes, assumptions and priorities and push the organisation to move faster where the opportunity warrants it.

• Work directly with the COO, ExCo and senior leadership team, providing clear visibility of progress, surfacing blockers and opportunities, and being prepared to challenge senior stakeholders when delivery isn’t moving quickly enough.

What we’re looking for:

We're deliberately looking for an unusual combination of skills.

You need to understand technology, but you don't need to be an AI engineer. You need to understand transformation, but we don't want someone whose primary skill is running a programme plan.

You also need to understand how businesses actually operate. You'll be equally interested in why a decision takes three weeks, why ownership between two teams isn't clear or why five teams are doing versions of the same thing as you are in what the latest AI model can do.

We're looking for someone who combines commercial instinct, AI fluency, strong operating judgement and relentless execution.

You’ll probably have:

• Significant experience delivering technology, AI, automation, digital or business/operating‑model transformation in a fast‑moving organisation.

• Experience working on broader business transformation, organisational effectiveness, operating models or complex cross‑functional change.

• A strong understanding of how high‑performing organisations operate – including accountability, decision‑making, prioritisation, governance, management information and operating cadence.

• A strong practical understanding of modern AI – including LLMs, agentic AI, workflow automation and the rapidly evolving AI tooling ecosystem.

• Evidence that you’ve implemented AI or automation into real business processes and can demonstrate the impact it delivered.

• The ability to understand a business process quickly, break it down and identify where technology, AI, data, process redesign or organisational change can materially improve it.

• The ability to move comfortably between strategic and operational problems – from thinking about how part of the organisation should operate to getting underneath the detail of a broken workflow.

• Strong commercial judgement. You naturally think about value, ROI, opportunity cost and where limited organisational capacity should be deployed.

• Exceptional programme and execution skills. You create clarity from ambiguity, establish ownership, maintain momentum and don’t allow important initiatives to disappear into organisational gaps.

• Strong analytical skills and comfort using data to establish baselines, quantify opportunities and measure results.

• The ability to operate horizontally across an organisation and influence people who don’t report to you.

• The confidence and credibility to work directly with executives and senior leaders, including constructively challenging them when necessary.

• The judgement to know when a problem needs technology, when it needs process change, when it needs clearer accountability – and when it simply needs someone to make a decision.

• A bias towards experimentation and delivery. You’re comfortable prototyping something quickly, learning from it and improving it rather than waiting for perfect information.

• Excellent communication skills. You can turn complex technology and operational problems into clear decisions and actions.

• A genuine obsession with how AI is changing the way companies operate and how the best companies are redesigning themselves around it.

Nice to have

• Experience in fintech, financial services or another regulated environment.

• Experience working in a high‑growth technology business.

• Experience working directly with a COO, CEO or executive leadership team on business‑wide priorities.

• Experience with operating‑model design or organisational transformation.

• Experience implementing agentic AI or AI‑enabled workflows at organisational scale.

• Hands‑on experience with tools across the emerging AI and automation ecosystem.

• Experience with workflow and work‑management platforms such as Linear and using the data within them to improve organisational performance.

• Experience building business cases and measuring realised benefits from transformation programmes.

• Enough technical depth to prototype, interrogate solutions and work effectively with engineers and data teams without needing them to translate everything for you.

What success looks like

This role won’t be measured by the number of AI tools Chip deploys.

And it won’t only be measured by our AI programme.

It will be measured by whether Chip becomes a better, simpler and more scalable organisation as a result of your work.

Within your first year, we would expect to see a visible portfolio of AI‑enabled and broader business transformation underway across Chip, with clear evidence of processes being simplified or eliminated, manual activity reducing, decision‑making becoming faster and better informed, and teams able to handle greater scale without equivalent growth in headcount.

We would expect greater clarity around priorities and accountability, fewer organisational hand‑offs, better visibility of execution across teams, faster resolution of cross‑functional problems and a stronger connection between what the company has decided is important and where its resources are actually being deployed.

We should have significantly better visibility of how work flows through the organisation, where our capacity is being deployed and where opportunities exist to improve performance.

Our leadership team should have better information with which to run the business, clearer visibility of where intervention is required and greater confidence that decisions and commitments are translating into action.

Most importantly, AI should increasingly become part of how Chip operates, rather than something the business occasionally uses, and our operating model should continue to evolve to take advantage of what AI makes possible.

What we’re really looking for:

We want someone who looks at the way a business operates and instinctively thinks: there has to be a better way of doing this.

Then goes and builds it.

Sometimes the answer will

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