AI Innovation Associate

AI Innovation Associate
CIG | Full-Time | Early Career (1 – 3 Years Experience)

About the Role
This person will be responsible for helping to build CIG Communities into a fully AI-powered operation across every aspect of the business. From marketing and investor relations to property management and accounting, you will identify where AI creates leverage, build the workflows to capture it, and bring every team along with you.

You won't be recommending tools from the sidelines. You will be embedded in the business, working directly with each team to design, deploy, and iterate on solutions that reflect how CIG actually operates.

If you prefer AI over traditional office software suites and you want to train, teach, and position others to do the same, this role is for you.

What You'll Do

Across all teams:

• Act as the primary internal resource for evaluating and utilizing AI tools across the organization that help teams reimagine their workflows.
• Provide hands-on training, coaching, and change-management support to staff at all comfort levels with technology.
• Governance & Security: Establish and maintain internal guardrails for data privacy, ensuring proprietary financial data, tenant information, and investor communications are handled securely within approved AI environments.
• Monitor the rapidly evolving AI landscape and bring forward relevant new capabilities as they emerge.

In support of specific functions:

• Marketing: Build content generation pipelines, brand-consistent copy workflows, graphic design, and social media scheduling integrations.
• Investor Relations: Support drafting, summarization, materials development, and data synthesis tasks related to investor communications and reporting.
• Multifamily Development: Build site selection research workflows, financial modeling templates, and document organization for due diligence.
• Accounting: Identify opportunities to automate reconciliation checks, reporting summaries, and document extraction tasks.
• HR: Support onboarding documentation, policy tools, and job description development.
• Property Management: Build tenant communication templates, maintenance request triage workflows, and reporting automation.
• Construction: Develop workflows for construction project management support, documentation, and progress reporting.

What We're Looking For

Must-have:

• 1–3 years of experience in operations, tech implementation, consulting, or a highly proactive internship background showing a track record of independent execution.
• Experience with Python scripting, SQL, or REST APIs.
• Demonstrated fluency with AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Notion AI, or similar) and genuine enthusiasm for staying current as the space evolves.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with a proven ability to translate technical or abstract concepts into simple, practical terms for non-technical colleagues.
• Comfort working independently, managing multiple workstreams across departments, and driving horizontal change management.
• Proven ability to work effectively with diverse teams and manage expectations and priorities across all levels of the organization (managing up).
• Genuine curiosity about commercial real estate, particularly multifamily housing development and investment management.

Nice-to-have:

• Experience building no-code or low-code automations (Zapier, n8n, Make, Airtable, etc.).
• Interest in real estate, finance, or urban development.
• Familiarity with financial modeling concepts or real estate underwriting.
• Exposure to Excel or Google Sheets at an advanced level.

Education:
A degree or related experience in a related field such as Information Systems, Business Analytics, Computer Science, Data Science, Finance, or Communications is a plus. We are equally interested in candidates whose academic background may look different but who have built a clear, deliberate track record of learning and applying AI tools. What matters most is that this is not a side interest. It is the direction you are building your career around.

Certifications (a plus, not a requirement):
Relevant certifications signal genuine investment in the space. Examples include AI fundamentals programs from Google, IBM, Microsoft, or Anthropic; prompt engineering courses from DeepLearning.AI or similar; and automation certifications from platforms like Zapier or Make. We are not looking for a specific credential. We are looking for someone who pursues this knowledge on their own initiative.

Who You Are
You are a self-starter who gets excited about new technology and isn't waiting to be handed a roadmap. You are comfortable sitting in a meeting with the property management team in the morning and helping investor relations automate a capital call update in the afternoon. You adapt quickly, communicate clearly, and take satisfaction in helping other people work better.

You also understand that the firms that fall behind won't be the small ones. They'll be the ones at any size waiting for someone else to build the future for them. You are not that person.

Why This Role
This is a position with real leverage. CIG is an established real estate development firm in the middle of a meaningful transition in AI-enabled operations that is coming from top leadership. As the person in this seat, you'll have direct visibility into how a real estate business runs from multiple angles simultaneously, and you'll be shaping how the organization approaches technology going forward. It's an unusual amount of executive visibility and operational breadth for an early-career role.

This position is based at our corporate headquarters in Cincinnati. This is an in-office position, not eligible for remote or hybrid arrangements.