AI Strategist - Senior Director

The AI Strategist plays a pivotal role in shaping Cognizant’s AI portfolio by designing high impact AI use cases, building compelling value propositions, and enabling early-stage client engagement. Sitting at the intersection of business design, AI capability, and industry needs, this role transforms opportunity spaces into structured, scalable, commercially strong AI offerings that drive growth for the AI Market Unit. Impact AI use cases, building compelling value propositions, and enabling early-stage client engagement. Sitting at the intersection of business design, AI capability, and industry needs, this role transforms opportunity spaces into structured, scalable, commercially strong AI offerings that drive growth for the AI Market Unit.

This role is ideal for a product-minded consultant or solution designer who can blend conceptual thinking, business acumen, and AI literacy to build differentiated offerings that win in the market. Minded consultant or solution designer who can blend conceptual thinking, business acumen, and AI literacy to build differentiated offerings that win in the market., 1. AI Offering & Use Case Design

• Own conceptual and architectural design for prioritized AI use cases and offerings.
• Translate business problems, industry signals, and AI capabilities into structured solution blueprints.
• Develop narratives, workflows, and design artifacts that illustrate the “art of the possible” and competitive differentiation.

1. Value Proposition Development & Collateral Creation * Build business value frameworks, impact models, and client-ready point of view documents of-view documents. * Create reusable offering assets including pitch decks, one-pagers, POVs, demo scripts, and solution differentiators. * Align offerings with market demand, competitive insights, and Cognizant’s internal capability landscape.

2. Client & Internal Engagement * Partner with clients, sales teams, ISLs, consulting, and pre-sales in early discovery phases. * Lead ideation sessions and offer walkthroughs to surface use cases and refine solution approaches. * Support pursuit teams with value narratives, offering insights, and strategic justification for AI-led transformation programs.

Decision Rights

Owns

• Contribution to the AI offering portfolio strategy-prioritization, roadmap, and investment inputs.
• Offering qualification and readiness criteria for GTM launch.
• Approval of pricing models, ROI frameworks, and sales kits used across pursuits.
• Accountability for offering lifecycle performance (revenue, adoption, renewals).

Influences

• GTM and market positioning for AI offerings.
• Field enablement through playbooks, kits, and value selling tools.
• Engineering decisions to ensure offerings are scalable and deployment ready.

Key Performance Indicators

• Number of new AI offerings developed.
• Offering attach rate across accounts.
• Total contract value (TCV) driven by AI offerings.

Stakeholder Interactions

Internal

• AI Business & Design Leadership
• Pre-Sales Specialists
• Ecosystem Leaders
• AI Specialist Sales
• Service Line & Business Unit Heads

External

• Business Owners / Functional Leaders (Supply Chain, Finance, CX/CRM, Healthcare Ops)
• Product Managers
• Data Science & Analytics Teams
• IT & Enterprise Architecture Teams
• Cloud & Platform Engineering Teams
• Operations & Transformation Leaders
• Security & Compliance Teams

• Min 15 years of consulting, solution design, digital/AI strategy, or product/experience design.
• Proven experience framing business problems and structuring AI or digital solutions.
• Exposure to AI platforms, GenAI toolchains, and industry specific AI use specific cases.
• Strong commercial acumen and ability to tie technology to business value.
• Demonstrated stakeholder management and cross functional collaboration.

Key Competencies

• Strong conceptual and structured problem-solving skills.
• Ability to blueprint solutions and articulate complex ideas simply.
• Business storytelling and narrative building for executive audiences.
• Ability to work seamlessly with sales, engineering, consulting, and product teams.
• Understanding of AI/ML concepts at a business technical level (not necessarily hands on technical).

The annual base salary for this position is between $200,000 - $275,000 depending on the experience and other qualifications of the successful candidate.

This position is also eligible for Cognizant’s discretionary annual incentive program and stock awards, based on performance and subject to the terms of Cognizant’s applicable plans.

Benefits : Cognizant offers the following benefits for this position, subject to applicable eligibility requirements:

• Medical/Dental/Vision/Life Insurance
• Paid holidays plus Paid Time Off
• 401(k) plan and contributions
• Long-term/Short-term Disability
• Paid Parental Leave
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Disclaimer: The salary, other compensation, and benefits information is accurate as of the date of this posting. Cognizant reserves the right to modify this information at any time, subject to applicable law.