Senior Director, AI Commercial Business Partner - Oncology Business Unit US

Role: Senior Director, AI Commercial Business Partner - Oncology Business Unit US

Location: Gaithersburg US

Salary: Competitive + Excellent Benefits

Do you have an organizational mindset and -can-do attitude that enables you to deliver positive outcomes on high impact and complex AI projects? Are you looking to join a growing team that will design and deliver value-driven change to an organization, do you relish the opportunity to drive wide scale commercial innovation across teams and lead the AI revolution in commercial for AstraZeneca.

About AstraZeneca:

At AstraZeneca, we are proud of our ground-breaking pipeline and continue to look for new ways to bring the best medicines to patients. We are building and fostering high-performing collaborative teams across the organization to help us deliver on our ambition. There’s no better time to join our global, growing enterprise as we lead the way for patients, healthcare and broader society.

AI Commercial Team (AIC):

The AI Commercial team, is part of the newly founded Enterprise AI team (EAI), delivering AI strategy and coordinated commercial progress and programs, in close collaboration with our business teams, and in partnership with our enterprise teams. We lead cross-functional and commercial-wide initiatives to deliver transformative commercial value and ensure we are at our best in delivering lifesaving medicines to patients.

What you’ll do:

AI Commercial Business Leaders are the embedded “translators” between business functions and the AI Commercial organization, responsible for the success of AI programs. The role is strategically positioned in therapy areas, markets, and functions with the objectives to drive translation, adoption, and lifecycle management of AI solutions in the business.

Key deliverables include translating business needs into well-scoped AI use cases and ensure each solution delivers measurable business impact. This requires you to be bilingual in business/science and technology, enabling you to connect domain priorities with AI delivery teams. You will be responsible for owning the full lifecycle of AI solutions - from ideation through delivery, adoption, and decommissioning - and are accountable for driving real, sustained value and reuse.

In this role, you will be responsible for building the bridge between business teams at a Region and Market level, and technical experts within the AIC and EAI function as well as key other Enterprise technology teams such as Commercial IT and Global Business Services. As part of this role, you will champion the key commercial AI programs in service of enhancing customer engagement, powered by actionable AI insights, delivered thought agentic platforms. In addition, you will partner on the delivery of AI capability building programs.

To do this successfully, you will share geographic location with the respective Region team, have a seat at the Senior leader table for the Region, with connection further enhanced through dotted line reporting to the Region, while sitting on the AIC Leadership team reporting to VP AIC.

Oncology Business Unit (OBU) is responsible for the commercialisation of medicines across some of the most hard-to-treat forms of disease, including: lung, breast, gastrointestinal, gynaecological, genitourinary and haematology cancers.

Responsibilities include:

• Strategy and portfolio ownership of new AI Commercial programs for in partnership with the business teams.
• Single point of contact and responsible for engagement for AI Commercial capabilities programs for the Region, maintaining AI roadmaps aligned with business needs, developing business cases in partnership with the business, and promoting reuse principles.
• Translation of needs into AI use cases: Engaging with stakeholders to identify unmet needs and translating these into well-defined AI use cases with clear metrics and requirements and a clear alignment with business strategy and AI30 focus areas.
• Delivery, scale, adoption and value tracking of AI initiatives: co-leading solution delivery, overseeing lifecycle management including pilot shaping, deployment, adoption, and value realization, while ensuring appropriate evidence frameworks are applied.
• Change management and governance: Acting as change leaders embedding AI into operations, support AI literacy, and ensure data governance and compliance with standards and regulations, while collaborating with internal and external partners to drive commercial success at scale.
• Translating business needs into well-scoped AI use cases and ensuring each solution delivers measurable business impact. This requires you to be bilingual in business and technology, enabling you to connect domain priorities with AI delivery teams. Owning the full lifecycle of AI solutions - from ideation through delivery, adoption, and decommissioning.
• Spot and shape new enterprise initiatives by scanning internal/external trends and partnering with functional leaders.
• Track industry, market and innovation shifts to anticipate opportunities and risks.
• Lead change through structured stakeholder engagement, aligning perspectives and guiding teams through uncertainty.
• Define KPIs and monitoring to evaluate progress and pivot when needed.

Typical Accountabilities include:

• AI Strategy and portfolio ownership
  • Serve as the single business owner for AI solutions in their therapy area, market, or function.
  • Maintain and sequence a clear AI roadmap aligned to business, medical, access, and R&D priorities.
  • Develop business cases and value narratives to support prioritization decisions.
  • Embed reuse principles ("build or buy once, scale to many") when defining and shaping demand.
• Translation of needs into AI use cases
  • Engage business leaders and cross-functional teams to surface unmet needs and decision points where AI can drive new outcomes.
  • Translate needs into well-scoped AI use cases with clear problem statements, success metrics, data requirements, and risk tiering.
  • Act as bilingual translators connecting business priorities, scientific context, and technology capabilities.
• Delivery, scale, adoption and value tracking
  • Co-lead delivery with enterprise AI teams to ensure solutions fit real workflows and local systems.
  • Own the full AI Program lifecycle, including:
  • Pilot shaping
  • Scaled deployment
  • Local adoption and change readiness
  • Tracking of adoption KPIs
  • Outcome and ROI realization
  • Remediation or decommissioning when needed
  • Ensure correct evidence frameworks are applied to measure value.
• Change management and ways of working
  • Act as change leaders for AI, embedding new practices into day-to-day operations – avoiding one-off pilots that don’t inform or lead to a scaled solution
  • Identify required process and role shifts and work with functional leaders to implement them, in order to advance adoption of AI solutions.
  • Support AI literacy and upskilling by partnering with the AITO team and HR on targeted learnings.
• Data, governance and compliance point of contact for the Oncology Business Unit (OBU) US region
  • Partner with Enterprise Demand Excellence (EDE) and AITT to ensure data used in solutions is AI-ready and compliant with enterprise standards (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, AI act, SAMd).
  • Ensure each AI use case follows the enterprise governance framework, including:
  • Registry-before-scale
  • Model and data cards
  • Ongoing monitoring
  • Human-in-the-loop oversight when required
  • Ensure AI solutions align with quality, legal, compliance, PV and safety requirements, and local codes.
• Deliver Partnership and ecosystem

• Clear co-development of AI programs and delivery plans, ensuring business maintains sponsorship and ownership from inception to delivery and scaling.
• Develop clear and deep delivery relationships with Commercial AI and Global Business Services teams. Drive focus across business and enterprise teams to establish clear and mutually aligned remits for coordinated delivery of AI programs
• Build a culture of coordinated delivery with pride, shared purpose and celebration. Supporting a culture of co-delivery and ability to raise and address concerns in a psychologically safe environment.

• Integration with enterprise AI organization

• Act as the primary interface between your business area and CAI Capability teams (Customer and Patient Engagement, Commercial DS&AI) and Enterprise AI teams (i.e., AISI, AITC, AICA, AIEI, AITT, EDE), ensuring clarity on ownership, priorities and hand-offs.

Essential for the Role:

• Minimum 10 years professional pharma experience, with 5-7 years focus on leading transformation programs in commercial pharma
• Demonstrated commercial and scientific domain experience reflecting a deep understanding of the needs of the business function and Region you are responsible for.
• Strong analytical and communication skills at all levels of the organization and the ability to operate successfully in highly matrixed organizations
• Effective interpersonal and relationship management skills with consultative approach and ability to interact and build trust
• Operational effectiveness, highly organized process with follow through
• Strong initiative to understand our core business goals and establish processes or programs to set direction, generate alignment and push forward
• Financial background and understanding of forecasts, budgets, financial activities and tools
• Resourceful, motivated, influential and proactive; able to prioritize in a fast-growing organization
• Experience in strategic planning processes and tools and/or project management tools

Desirable for the Role

• Graduate degree (MBA, Masters, MD or PhD preferred)
• Experience in leading and managing alliances or strategic partnerships
• Experience in translating business needs into a coordinated business proposal and plan for cross-functional senior leadership team
• Ability to develop creative and simple solutions to complex problems

Next Steps?

Are you ready to step up and take ownership of your work, solutions for the business and your personal career development? Apply now and join us in our mission to bring life-changing medicines to people!

Where can I find out more?

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When we put unexpected teams in the same room, we unleash bold thinking with the power to inspire life-changing medicines. In-person working gives us the platform we need to connect, work at pace and challenge perceptions. That’s why we work, on average, a minimum of three days per week from the office. But that doesn't mean we’re not flexible. We balance the expectation of being in the office while respecting individual flexibility. Join us in our unique and ambitious world.

The annual base pay for this position ranges from $203,214 - $304,820 USD. Base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. 

In addition, our positions offer a short-term incentive bonus opportunity; eligibility to participate in our equity-based long-term incentive program. Benefits offered included a qualified retirement program [401(k) plan]; paid vacation and holidays; paid leaves; and, health benefits including medical, prescription drug, dental, and vision coverage in accordance with the terms and conditions of the applicable plans.

Additional details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment. If hired, employee will be in an “at-will position” and the Company reserves the right to modify base pay (as well as any other discretionary payment or compensation program) at any time, including for reasons related to individual performance, Company or individual department/team performance, and market factors.

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