Deployment Strategist

About AI71:

ai71 builds enterprise-grade AI for the organisations that run the real economy: governments, banks and large enterprises across the Middle East & Africa. Our work is grounded in deep research and a commitment to deploying AI securely, responsibly and at scale.

“Ask” is our agentic AI platform. It puts AI agents to work on an organisation’s own knowledge, systems and workflows: agents that reason through complexity, draw on the organisation’s collective knowledge, and complete real work rather than just answer questions. Ask is built to be infrastructure and model-agnostic, so it runs inside a customer’s existing stack and security perimeter instead of forcing them onto ours. Today it is deployed across knowledge-heavy functions like legal, finance, HR and procurement, in some of the most regulated environments in the world.

The Role:

As ai71 scales across the region, the gap between a signed contract and a working deployment has become one of the most consequential spaces in the business. Deployment Strategists own that gap. You sit inside the deployment strategy team, embedded with enterprise customers from first discovery through to steady-state adoption, acting as the bridge between what a customer needs and what ASK can do.

This is deliberately not a customer success or professional services function. It is hands-on and customer-facing. You run the engagement from kickoff to go-live, own the relationship with the customer’s operational and technical counterparts, work out how to configure Ask for their environment, stack and chosen models - because Ask is model- and infrastructure-agnostic, no two deployments look the same - design the testing and evaluation frameworks that prove it works, and keep a complex programme on cadence. What you learn feeds back into the product team: how we deploy, what we standardise, and where we invest in tooling.

What You'll Do:

As a deployment strategist you are a trusted advisor to our customers. You are an expert at drawing out their requirements and pain points, distilling them to their core, and working with product and forward deployed engineers to ship deployments that move the customer’s numbers. You will:

• Own end-to-end deployment for one or more enterprise clients across a structured lifecycle, from commercial brief through to offboarding
• Own the business outcome of each deployment - adoption, value realised and the case for expansion - not just the go-live. A deployment that ships but isn’t used has not succeeded.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for client operational and technical stakeholders throughout each engagement, driving the client relationship forward and solidifying ai71 as a trusted partner
• Shape how clients define success early in each engagement - including evaluation criteria, acceptance thresholds, and what success looks like before go-live
• Define and run the deployment cadence, from kickoff, to regular check-ins and steercos, as well as user onboarding and platform training
• Work with customers to identify and map their AI use cases, helping them to define an agentic future state for their core processes and services
• Build and deliver demos for client stakeholders ranging from technical teams to executive sponsors focused on their desired business outcomes
• Work with Product and Engineering to translate client feedback into platform improvements and prioritised requests
• Improve the function itself: building the playbooks, templates and standards that make each deployment better than the last.

What You'll Bring:

You bring 5+ years in product management, management or strategy consulting, program management, or an adjacent role where you have coordinated technical delivery in a fast-paced environment. Engineering management, technical product management and production roles are also common paths in - we are open to a range of backgrounds. Prior exposure to agentic systems, AI platforms or enterprise SaaS is a real plus. The role does not require coding or engineering experience, but you should be comfortable holding the room with technical and non-technical audiences alike.

Beyond experience, here are the qualities we are looking for:

• Ownership: you have a keen sense of ownership and can point to complex programs that would not have shipped without you. Not facilitating, owning. You are comfortable in environments where the playbook is still being written, and you shape the function rather than wait to be handed one.
• Technical depth: you can dive into AI concepts and hold your own with engineers - critiquing designs, surfacing risks, asking the question that makes an FDE pause. You know your way around the building blocks of modern AI products (LLMs, agents, evals, RAG, orchestration), or are hungry to get there fast, and you have spent real time building with agentic AI in both professional and personal settings.
• Relationships: you build trust with technical and non-technical stakeholders at every level, all the way to the C-Suite. You know what makes them tick and how to take them on the change-management journey of AI adoption.
• Clarity: you connect the dots in ways others do not, especially around use cases, dependencies and organizational bottlenecks, and you strive to reach alignment through shared understanding, clear stakeholder management, and consistent direction.

This role is embedded with clients, so expect significant onsite time with customers across the UAE and the wider region.

We know many strong candidates won’t tick every box above. If your experience looks a little different but you believe you can bring value to this role, we would like to hear from you.

Why AI71:

• Mission-Driven Work: Work on cutting-edge AI applications with a talented and passionate team, solving real-world challenges in critical sectors.
• Unparalleled Opportunity: This is a chance to innovate and solve real-world challenges using AI at a company with unique access to world-leading models and resources.
• Career Growth: We offer competitive compensation, benefits, and significant career growth opportunities as a foundational member of the team.
• World-Class Environment: Enjoy a flexible working environment and the latest tools & technologies needed to do your best work.