Group Transformation – AI Strategic Implementation Lead

Group Transformation – AI Strategic Implementation Lead

Location: London, minimum 4 days per week onsite across Herne Hill and Carter Lane, with travel to other Group offices as required
Salary: Competitive, dependent on experience plus company benefits
Contract: 18-month fixed-term transformation contract, with potential to extend

At Mark Allen, we create specialist content, events, data and insight for professional communities across sectors such as healthcare, agriculture, education and finance.

As AI Strategic Implementation Lead, you will lead our four-person AI Implementation Pod, a multidisciplinary, agile team at the centre of Mark Allen Group, helping turn our wider Group transformation ambitions into practical, measurable change. You'll bring together existing initiatives, identify opportunities to improve how we work and lead the implementation of solutions that deliver genuine business value, whether through AI, automation, better integration or simpler processes. This is not a pure strategy role, nor is it a technical engineering role. It sits at the intersection of strategy, transformation and implementation.

Reporting to the Group COO, you will provide strategic direction, prioritise opportunities and lead business implementation, working alongside an AI Technical Implementation Lead who brings hands-on engineering expertise and technical leadership. Together, supported by a Programme & Adoption Manager and Transformation Fellow, you will connect business needs, technical delivery and sustained adoption.

The Pod will work closely with managing directors, functional leaders and our development and data teams to understand and redesign workflows, improve processes and establish the systems and foundations needed for effective implementation.

For someone who has spent the early part of their career advising organisations on transformation, this is an opportunity to move in-house and own one end-to-end. You will have the autonomy and resources to shape and deliver a major Group-wide programme, supported by a dedicated AI Implementation Pod and selected external specialists.

What you’ll be doing

Lead and connect Group Transformation

• Set the strategic direction and priorities for the AI Implementation Pod within the wider Group transformation programme, taking accountability for its outcomes and ensuring the integrated delivery roadmap supports these objectives.

• Bring existing pilots, tools, experimentation and initiatives into the central programme where appropriate, identifying duplication, gaps and conflicting approaches.

• Connect workflow transformation, tooling and licensing, governance, policy, training, adoption and technical implementation, ensuring individual initiatives remain aligned with Group strategy and priorities.

• Provide leadership and oversight across the programme, resolve strategic priorities and escalated issues, and keep workstreams aligned with Group objectives.

Turn opportunities into practical transformation

• Work discipline by discipline and workflow by workflow to understand how work is currently undertaken and identify pain points, duplication, manual activity and opportunities for redesign.

• Prioritise opportunities according to strategic relevance, impact, feasibility and scalability, translating business needs into practical implementation plans.

• Lead the redesign of priority workflows, including the appropriate division of work between people, AI, automation and agentic systems.

• Identify what those changes mean for roles, responsibilities, skills and organisational structures.

Create the framework for safe, responsible implementation

• Ensure AI activity operates within agreed Group governance and policy, identifying where further policies, standards or guidance are required and continually developing these as technology and organisational needs evolve.

• Work closely with relevant colleagues on security, data protection, intellectual property, content protection, legal and ethical considerations, intervening or escalating where activity falls outside agreed guardrails.

• Maintain an active view of developments in AI technology, regulation, publishing, information services and the wider competitive landscape, translating these into implications and opportunities for Mark Allen.

• Work with the Technical Lead and Fellow to maintain a structured approach to horizon scanning, helping ensure the Group remains proactive rather than responding after the market has moved.

Turn implementation into measurable value

• Manage relationships with external consultants, partners and suppliers, ensuring their expertise and solutions support Group transformation priorities and deliver measurable value.

• Build internal capability so that Mark Allen benefits from external expertise without becoming dependent on consultancy support.

• Work with the Programme & Adoption Manager to establish meaningful baselines and measures of value.

• Ensure implementation priorities reflect commercial as well as operational value, identifying productivity gains, capacity release, structural opportunities and new growth opportunities.

• Report progress and implications clearly to the Group COO and ExCo.

What you will be here to achieve

Over the first 18 months, your focus will be to:

• Establish a coherent Group-wide AI implementation model.

• Bring fragmented AI activity into an aligned and governed programme.

• Establish a repeatable discipline-by-discipline transformation methodology.

• Move priority workflows from experimentation into embedded ways of working.

• Establish effective Group-wide governance, policy and implementation standards.

• Deliver measurable organisational and commercial value through productivity improvements, capacity release, simplification and growth opportunities.

• Build strong relationships across the Group and create confidence in the programme.

• Help Mark Allen progressively move from responding to AI change to operating ahead of the curve.

Success will not be measured by the number of pilots launched or tools purchased. It will be measured by whether the Group has moved from fragmented experimentation to a coherent implementation model, whether workflows and ways of working have materially changed, whether AI is being deployed safely and systematically, and whether the programme creates demonstrable organisational and commercial value.

Must-haves:

• Experience delivering complex transformation programmes involving people, process, technology and operating model change.

• Practical experience applying AI or automation to business workflows, with an understanding of its limitations, controls and adoption challenges.

• Proven ability to translate strategy into practical implementation and delivery.

• Strong structured problem-solving and analytical capability.

• Confidence working directly with senior executives and constructively challenging established thinking.