Director of AI
Who is Ludia Consulting?
Ludia Consulting is one of the fastest-growing and innovative consulting firms in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain, Customer Engagement, and Power Platform. We are looking for a team member committed to helping others and their communities while also growing professionally as part of our Ludia family.
We are not just a traditional organization; we are driven to help our partners and clients while delivering value every day. Our team members are encouraged to grow by sharing their knowledge and experience through community-driven channels, including local non-profit organizations.
About Ludia Labs
Ludia Labs is our AI innovation studio. It is where we build the AI accelerators, intelligent agents, and Microsoft Copilot solutions that we put to work for our customers and inside our own business. We have a direct line to Microsoft Engineering and FastTrack, and we ground everything we build in our Dynamics 365 and Physical Operations experience.
The Role
Reports To: Chief Operations Officer
Responsible For: the Ludia Labs AI engineering team, and the firm's AI policy, platform register, and AI budget
As Director of AI, you lead how Ludia uses AI, inside our own walls and in what we deliver to customers. You own the internal AI strategy that brings intelligent agents to every part of the business, the policy and governance that keep those agents safe, the budget that pays for them, and the Ludia Labs accelerators that put the same capability in our customers' hands. We care about AI that reaches production and gets used. You are also responsible for all Customer AI Implementation projects.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You know Dynamics 365 cold, because nearly every agent and accelerator we build sits on top of it, and you are comfortable in the code, the architecture, and the standards that keep what we ship reliable. You set the bar for how Ludia builds AI, and you give the team the tools to move faster.
You are also a human-first thinker. You believe AI should get more out of people rather than replace them: pair human reasoning and judgment with agents that handle the rest, and people do their best work. You will be Ludia's advocate for that future inside the firm, and you will help our customers picture it and get there too.
You work with the leaders of Operations, Delivery, Sales, Marketing, and Talent to turn ideas into automation the business can measure. You meet with the CEO monthly and with the AI Steering Committee quarterly, and you run the AI function in between. Security, governance, and responsible AI stay central to everything you ship.
What Success Looks Like
Every responsibility below ties back to one of these measures. You and the CEO review them each quarter.
In your first 90 days
- Ludia's AI Policy and its platform register are current, adopted by the leadership team, and in daily use. Every AI platform is listed with the teams approved to use it and the highest data class it may hold.
- One internal agent is in production with named users, a named owner, and a measured result.
- AI spend is visible. Every seat, license, and consumption line is tracked by platform and reported to the CFO monthly.
- Ludia's AI development standards and definition of done are written and applied to every active build.
In your first year
- An agent is in production in each of Sales, Delivery, Operations, Marketing, and Talent, and each one reports its hours saved or revenue touched every month.
- Adoption is measured, not assumed: monthly active users per agent, and the share of team members using an approved AI tool each week.
- AI spend lands within the approved budget, and every pilot receives a written kill-or-scale decision within 90 days of launch.
- At least two Ludia Labs accelerators are versioned, documented, and deployed on customer projects.
- Every AI incident is reported inside the window the policy sets, and the quarterly register review runs on time, every quarter.
- Every team has completed hands-on AI enablement, and the monthly demonstration forum runs without you as the presenter.
Customer Facing
- Maintain a billable utilization target of 50%, tracked monthly.
- Serve as the primary point of contact for the AI products and its customers, including escalations and account health.
- Respond to customer issues promptly and see them through to resolution.
- Share customer feedback with delivery and leadership to improve the offering.
- Mentor junior consultants and contribute to delivery standards for AI related delivery.
- Identify expansion opportunities within existing accounts and partner with Sales to shape follow-on work, managed services, and roadmap engagements specific to AI.
- • Represent Ludia in executive briefings, steering committees, and quarterly business reviews.
Essential Functions
AI strategy, policy, governance, and cost
- Own Ludia's internal AI strategy and roadmap, and keep it tied to how the firm is growing and how our people actually work.
- Own Ludia's AI Policy and its amendment cycle. Keep it written by what a system can do and what it can touch, not by product name, so it survives a tool change.
- Run the AI platform register: which platforms we run under Company agreement, which teams may use each one, and the highest data class each may hold. Lead the quarterly register review, and take any capability change (a tool that can do more or reach further) through approval before it is switched on.
- Sit on the AI Steering Committee and operate the approval matrix, so everyday assisted work moves in a day and anything autonomous, or acting in a client's production environment, gets executive sign-off.
- Own the AI budget: seats and licenses, Copilot and Foundry consumption, and model costs. Report spend by platform to the CFO monthly, set consumption guardrails per agent, and retire what is not earning its cost.
- Own AI security for internal solutions: identity and access through Entra ID, data residency, access controls, audit trails, prompt-injection defense, and content safety. Work with leadership to keep Ludia's data and our clients' data protected.
- Run the AI incident process with a named AI System Owner in each function, so every system has an owner and no one reviews their own work.
Technical leadership and AI development standards
- Stay hands-on. Build agents yourself, set the standard for what good looks like, and review the work the team ships.
- Define Ludia's AI development standards: architecture and design patterns, prompt and grounding practices, evaluation and testing, security, and a clear definition of done for an agent. Every agent passes acceptance evaluation before it is released.
- Build and maintain the foundation that speeds the team up: shared SDKs and templates, reusable components, RAG pipelines over Azure AI Search, evaluation harnesses, CI/CD, and observability, using Azure DevOps or GitHub.
- Stand up the operational backbone for AI in production: telemetry and monitoring, application lifecycle management (ALM), human-in-the-loop controls, and responsible-AI guardrails.
- Choose the development platform (Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, the Microsoft Agent Framework) and make sensible build-versus-buy calls. Ground the work in Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Dataverse, so agents work with the systems our clients run on.
Agentic innovation and automation
- Work with team owners in Operations, Delivery, Sales, Marketing, and Talent to surface ideas for automation, then rank them by value and feasibility.
- Run discovery that turns real business pain points into agent solutions and keep a live backlog of the best opportunities.
- Pilot, measure, and scale what works, and kill what does not. Every pilot gets a named owner, defined users, a success measure, and a kill-or-scale decision within 90 days.
Ludia Labs accelerators
- Build and support the Ludia Labs accelerators and AI tools that bring repeatable, reliable AI to our customers.
- Shape the AI and agent strategy for the industries we know best (field service, operations, and Finance & Supply Chain) and tie it to our accelerator and IP roadmap.
- Package accelerators so others can reuse them: version, document, and support each one so delivery teams deploy with confidence.
Educate, mentor, and lead adoption
- Raise AI literacy across the whole organization: training, office hours, hands-on sessions, and the monthly demonstration forum.
- Mentor engineers and consultants on agent development and our AI standards, and grow the next set of AI leaders here.
- Lead adoption so people get more out of their day working alongside AI, and track it: who is using what, how often, and to what result.
Working across the business
- Bring credible AI expertise into pre-sales and customer conversations, including how Ludia governs its own AI, and keep the handoff from sales to delivery clean.
- Share what you are learning through demos, internal sessions, blogs, and the occasional white paper. Extend it to Dynamics for Good, where we put AI to work on community and mission impact.
Skills & Competencies
Required
- 10+ years in AI, data, or solution architecture roles, with at least 3 of those years leading an AI team, practice, or capability.
- A degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent hands-on experience.
- A track record of shipping AI agents and copilots into production, with real users and measurable value behind them.
- Deep, hands-on knowledge of Dynamics 365, the platform our agents and accelerators sit on: how Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, and Finance & Supply Chain work, plus the Power Platform and Dataverse underneath.
- You still write code and build agents yourself (C#/.NET, Python, or TypeScript), and you can set the patterns, standards, and review bar that everyone else follows.
- Hands-on command of the Microsoft AI stack: Copilot Studio (agents, topics, actions, connectors, plugins), Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility and declarative agents, Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry), Azure OpenAI, and Azure AI Search across vector, hybrid, and semantic retrieval.
- Fluency with agentic patterns: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), grounding, multi-agent orchestration, evaluation for groundedness and traceability, human-in-the-loop, and telemetry. You have used Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, or the Microsoft Agent Framework, and open protocols such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A).
- Experience owning an AI acceptable-use policy or governance program, and an AI budget, in a company that handles client data. You can explain a platform decision to a CFO and a data-handling answer to a client's security team.
- Real ownership of AI security and responsible AI: access controls, data residency, audit trails, prompt-injection defense, content safety, and governance through Entra ID, DLP, environments, and ALM.
- Working knowledge of the data foundation for enterprise AI: Microsoft Fabric, Dataverse, and Power Platform.
- A human-first leadership style: you communicate well with executives, you lead change, and you get the most out of people by pairing them well with technology.
- A talent for teaching and growing people: you can run enablement, mentor engineers, and raise AI literacy across a services organization.
Preferred
- Experience in our Physical Operations verticals (heavy equipment, energy, manufacturing, engineering & construction, professional services) and with Dynamics 365, especially F&SC, Customer Engagement, and Field Service.
- Microsoft AI certifications, especially AI Transformation Leader (AB-731) and Agentic AI Business Solutions Architect Expert (AB-100).
- Experience building reusable accelerators, IP, or marketplace solutions.
- Familiarity with ISO/IEC 42001 or a comparable AI management standard, and with the US state and EU AI rules that apply to a services firm.
Desirable
- AI Agent Builder Associate (AB-620) or Azure AI Engineer Associate (AI-102).
- Ability to travel occasionally within the United States for Microsoft, client, or industry events.
Benefits / Why Ludia
- Companywide time off at the end of the year
- Full health, vision, and dental benefits
- Work directly with Microsoft's engineering and FastTrack teams
- Opportunity to build and lead Ludia's AI capability and the Ludia Labs accelerator portfolio
Ludia Consulting is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Applicants receive consideration for employment regardless of their race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, or status with regard to public assistance.
