Job Overview:

The Executive Director (ED) of AI and Transformation is the strategic executive leader overseeing the acceleration and adoption of AI/ML across Fortrea’s enterprise. The life sciences industry is at an inflection point and is entering the 4th industrial revolution. Clinical Research Organizations who reinvent themselves and adopt and scale AI/ML will continue to compete, grow, and deliver positive impact to biopharmaceutical sponsors, patients, and healthcare. The ED of AI and Transformation will lead Fortrea’s strategic AI/ML roadmap, contributing to the organization’s differentiation, efficiency, and growth. They will influence the enterprise and engage the life sciences ecosystem, connecting with peers in industry and technology. The ED, through their efforts, will increase Fortrea’s innovative reputation leading to improved win rates with clients. They will need to influence and obtain buy in from leaders across the company, their peers in IT leadership and our C-level executives.

In addition to matrixed leadership, the ED will be accountable for leading a lean AIML team, developing state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning pipelines, models, and applications and setting AIML standards for the organization. These algorithms will augment employees and replace tasks through the deployment of agents. The ED will be accountable for partnering across the business to help employees adopt and embed new ways of working. They will work closely with data scientists and engineers to develop and deploy highly capable AI/ML models and algorithms that address Fortrea's business challenges. This role serves as a champion of AI/ML by facilitating efforts to incorporate AI/ML capabilities into the Fortrea business model, applications, and processes. The role will stay abreast of prevailing trends, influence and change a large, matrixed, regulated organization, and enhance external, innovative reputation.

Summary of Responsibilities:

Strategic Leadership, Planning, and Communication:

Develop a strategic vision and roadmap for AI/ML and ensure initiatives are aligned with the organization's goals and objectives. This includes initiatives such as sales effectiveness, corporate function automation (e.g. procurement, legal, compliance, finance, IT), regulatory content generation, knowledge retrieval and understanding, clinical trial simulation.
Partner with senior leadership to prioritize AI initiatives, develop business cases, and co-own value generation. Performance will be evaluated based on business impact (e.g. productivity).
Partner with Consulting by providing thought leadership, frameworks, and solutions to differentiate and grow Consulting revenue.
Chair the AI council to drive business alignment.
Obtain buy-in from C-level executives and leaders across the enterprise.
Communicate vision to increase innovative reputation across the Fortrea enterprise, the life sciences ecosystem, and with peers in industry and technology.

AI/ML Development and Enterprise Implementation:

Work with data scientists and engineers to develop and deploy highly capable AI/ML models that address Fortrea's business challenges.
Effectively answer data science questions, build ML pipelines, and integrate results into business outcomes.
Build out a modeling ecosystem to answer a variety of sales and marketing questions, such as marketing mix, attribution, and channel optimization.
Apply AI/ML techniques to solve real-world business problems including using appropriate gradient boosting algorithms, neural networks, forecasting methods, and advanced data pipeline development.
Productize AI/ML models and embed them within Fortrea’s global technology suite of products to drive growth and productivity.
Partner across the business to help employees adopt and embed new ways of working.
Ensure the availability, quality, and security of data required for training and deploying AI/ML models.
Set AI/ML standards for the organization, including processes and monitoring metrics.
Embed model retraining, validation, and continuous improvement.

Team Leadership and Collaboration:

Collaborate with key stakeholders, including business leaders and department heads to understand requirements.
Identify and eliminate friction points within the organization by re-inventing processes using AI and AI agents.
Lead a team of AI/ML professionals, including AI/ML product managers, data scientists, machine learning engineers, responsible AI leads, and AI researchers.
Provide guidance, mentorship, and support to ensure the team's success while building a collaborative culture.
Establish partnerships to close skills and data gaps including academia, startups, and leading AI tech companies.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including consulting, clinical, security, applications, and operations, to ensure seamless integration of strategic data and integration solutions.
Work with and evolve better ways of working for data scientists and engineers across the enterprise.
Influence and inspire the enterprise and lead through change.

Innovation and Thought Leadership:

Serve as a champion of AI/ML by facilitating efforts to incorporate AI/ML capabilities into the Fortrea business model, applications, and processes.
Explore and evaluate emerging trends and technologies and data providers to identify opportunities for adoption.

People responsibilities:

1-5 Direct Reports.
5-15 Indirect Reports.

Qualifications (Minimum Required):

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, machine learning, data science, statistics, artificial intelligence, engineering or relevant areas.
Fortrea may consider relevant and equivalent experience in lieu of educational requirements.
Preferred: Master’s or other advanced degree in the aforementioned areas.

Experience (Minimum Required):

Strategically oriented executive who has a strong background in computer science, machine learning, predictive modeling, and other analytics frameworks with over 15+ years of experience.
Demonstrated ability to influence and change a large, global, matrixed organization with deep experience across CROs, biopharma, and healthcare.
Collaborative leader who can function effectively in a highly regulated environment during a period of dynamic change and prioritization with demonstrated track record of scalable impact.
5+ years of experience in leading a world class machine learning team or relevant field (e.g. statistics, computer science, engineering)
Exceptional technical skills and ability to design, architect, and implement AI/ML solutions.
Deep understanding of AI/ML and Data Engineering toolchains, pipelines, and model training techniques.
Experience with extracting value from clinical research data and applying insights to drive business outcomes.
Experience working with leadership from engineering, product, operations, and compliance to craft a roadmap and measures of success.
Ability to use AI/ML techniques to solve real-world business problems. Some examples would be appropriate use of gradient boosting algorithms, [sequential] neural networks, forecasting methods, and advanced data pipeline development.
Expertise in any of the following AI/ML domains: Causal AI, Reinforcement Learning, Generative AI, NLP, Dimension Reduction, Computer Vision, Sequential Models.
Proficiency with relevant programming languages (R and/or Python).
Strong analytical skills coupled with business acumen, and an ability to think strategically in an ambiguous environment.
Experience with healthcare data is a plus.
Ability to translate technical work for business partners.
Strong operational and management skills with a track record of consistently meeting project deadlines, budgets and delivering results.

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Executive Director, AI and Transformation

Job Description