This is an opportunity for an experienced, proactive, collaborative and personable individual, with a successful track record of helping organisations understand and embed data and AI opportunities to deliver tangible benefits. The successful individual will be able to bring their learning and experience from prior roles and build on the foundations we have already laid.

Whilst this is a strategy role, the candidate will have a background in practical delivery and execution of data and AI initiatives. They will have an appreciation of the commercial imperatives that come with technology investments, and the need to win hearts and minds to achieve success. It is important that any strategy engagement provided by Datasparq for our clients is anchored in reality and focused on being deliverable and impactful.

The candidate should be at ease with conducting stakeholder interviews and facilitating workshops, individually or with the support of colleagues. They should be able to bring structure and clarity to disparate and complex ideas. They should be confident in speaking to senior business, technical and data teams in our client organisations.

The AI & Data Strategy Consultant will be responsible for delivering AI and data strategy engagements, and growing our credentials in this space. Key responsibilities include:

Acting as an advisor to our clients, helping them identify and realise benefits from the use of AI:

• Work closely with clients to understand their current business and industry, identify the opportunities and impact that AI can enable in the short, medium and long term, and communicate this in an impactful and engaging way that delivers value and insight for Board-level, C-suite and leadership roles.
• Assess the maturity of clients’ AI and data capabilities and work with them to identify tangible opportunities to drive positive business outcomes from AI and data. Help them understand: what are the use cases worth pursuing? What's the business case for investment? What's the roadmap for implementation?
• Understand clients’ teams and their skill set, and help them identify what changes they should make to maximise value from AI. For example: what skills do they need? How does this compare to the skills they have in the business today? What new hires should they make? What are the right job descriptions? How should they interview candidates? What should the curriculum for their data teams be? What training is required for them? What should be outsourced?
• Understand how client organisations are structured, their culture and ways of working and advise them on how they should organise themselves to successfully execute AI and data initiatives. For example: how should they identify and prioritise demand? How should they split responsibilities between business and IT? How can they move to an agile way of working? What governance needs to exist to quantify and track benefits from AI and data initiatives?
• Guide clients as they transition to new ways of working to embed AI and data solutions within their processes. Help them manage change within their organisation by providing practical advice, based on a thorough understanding of their business. 
• Help clients make responsible use of AI. Advise them on what guardrails they should put in place to ensure that AI is used responsibly and transparently within the business and follows ethics standards.
• Build enduring and trusted relationships with our clients. Continuing to be a trusted advisor after any initial strategy work, and maintaining some accountability and assurance during subsequent delivery engagements.‍

‍Growing the commercial impact of our strategy capabilities:

• Collaborate with Sales (new business teams and client leads) to identify, define, scope and secure impactful strategy engagements.
• Define how we deliver effectively and efficiently for us and our clients e.g identifying the appropriate staffing profile of practitioners from our other families.
• Ensure the strategic vision, priorities and resulting initiatives and delivery roadmap have a sustainable impact for our clients, and provide a pathway for us to support those clients over the long term and to develop strong relationships.
• Support the development of our data & AI strategy capability by contributing to go-to-market offerings and sharing thought leadership.
  

‍Embedding our strategy capabilities and experience into the wider Datasparq team:

• Coach and mentor other Datasparq colleagues in advisory engagements.
• Support colleagues to grow internally and transition into a strategy role, as and where appropriate.

Datasparq is a specialist AI & data firm that designs, builds and runs high-impact AI & data solutions. We build bespoke AI and data science tools—and turn them into robust, reliable services for our clients.

We are a highly dedicated team of experienced data scientists, engineers, product designers and visualisation professionals who between us solve impactful problems for a diverse range of companies from international airlines to multinational pharmaceutical companies to luxury global hotel brands. 

We start with research and iterate—using lean startup principles—to quickly uncover impactful solutions to high-value challenges. Our product team ensure that we build the right solution in the right way. Our data science team ensure that the AI and data science solutions we build are best-in-class. And, our engineering team ensure that solutions are robust and ready to be deployed in the real world. When it comes to operationalising solutions, we run data science products in the cloud as services for our clients or deploy to their infrastructure as needed.

We don’t just build ML models—we take our science from the broad spectrum of mathematics, statistics, operations research and computer science. We work with academic partners and Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) across the UK to ensure that what we do is founded on high-quality, up-to-date science.

As a company, we don’t just value diversity - we place it at the heart of what we do. We need diverse thinking from diverse people to help us create solutions quickly that are effective and respect the audience for the tool.