SENIOR MANAGER, AI SOLUTIONS ENABLEMENT-(HYBRID, SAN FRANCISCO)

Role Summary

Our culinary and hospitality operations are continuing to advance in the us of AI to enhance, make efficient, and increase value outputs across our operations.  We are looking for an individual to support a high level account directly to take these advancements to the next and customized level.
This is not a research role and not a traditional engineering role. It is a builder-operator role for someone who is equally comfortable writing Python, sitting in a district operations review, and running a training session for people who are skeptical of AI.

Key Responsibilities

This role owns the identification, development, and enablement of AI-driven solutions across operations, culinary, finance, HR, and safety functions.
 Responsibilities span four core areas:

1. AI Adoption & Opportunity Identification

• Work directly with operations, culinary, finance, HR, and safety leaders to find where AI and automation create real leverage.
• Build and maintain a prioritized opportunity pipeline with sizing, effort, and expected impact.
• Say no to the low-value requests so the high-value ones ship.

2. Solution Development

• Design, build, and maintain solutions using ChatGPT, Codex, Power Platform, and lightweight scripting.
• Ship working tools, not decks about tools.
• Own them through iteration and adoption, not just first release.

3. Training & Enablement

• Make our operations teams self-sufficient — build the curriculum, documentation, and prompt libraries.
• Run live sessions and office hours.
• Success is measured by how much people build without you, not by how much they depend on you.

4. AI Governance & Best Practices

• Establish the practical guardrails: what data can go where, how outputs get reviewed before they reach a client, how tools get documented and handed off, when to build versus buy.
• Partner with IT, Legal, and Information Security rather than duplicating them.

• Representative Deliverables
• Illustrative examples of the work this role will design, ship, and own in the first 12–18 months:

Reporting & Analytics

• Automated operational reporting, labor analysis, and forecasting
• Executive dashboards replacing recurring manual assembly
• Data cleaning and standardization pipelines to make the above trustworthy

Financial Tooling

• Tools that simplify financial analysis and budget forecasting
• Labor calculators and catering profitability models

Culinary & Menu

• Assistants for recipe scaling, plate costing, nutritional analysis, and waste reduction
• Inventory tracking utilities

Communications & Client-Facing Materials

• Quarterly Business Reviews, innovation summaries, and executive presentations
• Automated routine communications and document generation
• Meeting preparation and executive summary support for senior leaders

Knowledge & Enablement

• Custom GPTs for Culinary, HR, Finance, Safety, and Operations
• SOPs, training documentation, and operational playbooks

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years in business systems analysis, technical product management, or a closely adjacent role — someone who has translated messy operational problems into working systems and owned the outcome.
• Demonstrated hands-on AI tool building. Bring examples: custom GPTs, agents, automations, or applications you built and that other people actually used. We will ask what broke and how you fixed it.
• Working proficiency in at least one of Python, SQL, or JavaScript for lightweight development and data work. You do not need to be a software engineer. You do need to read, write, and debug your own code.
• Process improvement and change management experience. You've rolled something out to people who didn't ask for it and gotten adoption anyway.
• Ability to teach non-technical users. Clear, patient, jargon-free, and able to hold a room.
• Executive-level communication. Your written work should be ready to put in front of a senior leader or a client without a rewrite.

Preferred Qualifications

• Microsoft Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI) and advanced Excel automation
• Foodservice, hospitality, retail, or multi-unit operations background — or genuine curiosity about how a kitchen and a P&L actually work
• Experience supporting field teams across distributed locations
• Exposure to AI governance, data classification, or responsible-use frameworks

Core Competencies

• The Manager, AI Solutions & Enablement will be evaluated against these four competencies, which reflect what high-performing builder-operators demonstrate at scaled organizations operating in the AI-native era:
• Bias Toward Shipping    A working prototype this week beats a perfect plan next quarter.
• Bilingual Operator    Comfortable being the most technical person in an operations meeting and the most operations-literate person in a technical one.
• Honest About AI    Skeptical of AI hype and honest about where these tools fail. You'll be asked to kill your own ideas.
• Energized by Enablement    Genuinely energized by making someone else's job easier, including when that means they stop needing you.

What Success Looks Like

• Performance in this role will be assessed against clear time-bound milestones in year one:
  Time Horizon    
• What Success Looks Like
  90 Days    Opportunity pipeline built and prioritized with functional leaders. Two or three quick wins shipped and in use. Relationships established with the operators who will make or break adoption.
  6 Months    Three to five solutions in production with measurable time or cost savings. Enablement curriculum live. First cohort of operators building on their own. Governance guardrails documented and agreed with IT and Legal.
  12 Months    A portfolio of tools the business would notice if it lost. A measurable reduction in manual reporting hours. A community of internal builders that no longer routes everything through you.