Executive Innovation Lead, AI Transformation

About the Team

The AI Transformation and Innovation team helps senior leaders imagine how AI could reshape their business—and turn the strongest ideas into action.

We work in small, multidisciplinary pods that bring together innovation strategy, research, experience design, prototyping, and technical expertise. We help customers look beyond incremental use cases, identify new sources of value, and explore how AI could change their products, services, customer experiences, and ways of working.

Our work moves quickly from insight to possibility to tangible proof. We partner with Sales, Solutions, Success, Product, Engineering, and implementation teams to help promising ideas move toward execution.

About the Role

As an Executive Innovation Lead, you will lead high-impact innovation engagements with CEOs and senior leadership teams.

You will help customers explore what is newly possible with AI, identify opportunities worth pursuing, and make future ideas concrete enough to evaluate. You will lead executive discovery, design and facilitate working sessions, guide a multidisciplinary pod, and turn emerging insights into a clear innovation direction.

This role requires more than generating ideas. You will help leadership teams make choices: which opportunities matter, what needs to change, what should be tested, and what should happen next.

This is a senior individual-contributor role for someone who combines strategic judgment, creative thinking, executive presence, and exceptional facilitation.

In This Role, You Will

• 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 help leaders consider 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 while maintaining clear roles, decisions, and handoffs.

• Build compelling executive narratives, opportunity portfolios, roadmaps, and near-term experiments.

• Create the conditions for productive disagreement, bold thinking, and practical decision-making.

• Turn lessons from individual engagements into reusable innovation methods, tools, and playbooks.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You

• Have led innovation, strategy, transformation, design, or customer advisory work with CEOs and senior executives.

• Can help leaders rethink a familiar business problem rather than simply improve an existing process.

• Are an exceptional workshop designer and facilitator who can move a group from possibility to decision.

• Balance imagination with rigor and know how to distinguish a promising idea from innovation theater.

• Can bring structure to ambiguous problems without narrowing the opportunity too quickly.

• Ask incisive questions and can challenge senior leaders while maintaining trust.

• Can identify patterns across interviews, observations, market shifts, and emerging behaviors.

• Turn complex or incomplete information into a clear point of view and a compelling story.

• Have led teams spanning strategy, research, design, prototyping, technology, and customer-facing functions.

• Understand how to use prototypes and visual storytelling to test an idea, not simply present it.

• Are curious about unfamiliar industries and energized by problems without obvious answers.

• Can collaborate fluently with technical teams without needing to be an engineer.

Experience in innovation consulting, design strategy, service design, customer strategy, futures, scenario planning, venture building, organizational transformation, qualitative research, or executive education may be helpful. We value the capabilities you have developed over any particular degree or professional path.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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