Director, Commercial - AI Acceleration and Innovation

We’re here for one reason and one reason only – to cure cancer. Every moment is dedicated to developing treatments and every action moves us one step closer to our goal. We’ve made incredible scientific breakthroughs and our pioneering personalized CAR T-cell therapies have changed the paradigm. But we're not finished yet.

Join Kite, as we make even bigger advances in cancer therapies, and help shape where our business and medical science goes next.

We believe every employee deserves a great leader. People Leaders are the cornerstone to the employee experience at Gilead and Kite. As a people leader now or in the future, you are the key driver in evolving our culture and creating an environment where every employee feels included, developed and empowered to fulfil their aspirations. Join Kite and help create more tomorrows.

Job Description

The Director, Commercial AI Acceleration and Innovation will support Kite’s commercial strategy and governance for AI initiatives, ensuring that innovation is purposeful, ethical, and value-driven.

This leader will be responsible for AI opportunity identification and framing, establishing and operationalizing the governance framework that prioritizes and oversees AI use cases across Commercial functions, leads organizational AI fluency in partnership with enterprise teams and support the roll up of the same to enterprise prioritization and governance.

This role closely with partner with Commercial/Medical Functions, GDDI functional teams and Gilead IT, to run communities of practice, intake and prioritize AI initiatives, drive proof of concept execution in partnership with technical teams, measure business impact, and enable transparent reporting through different governance forums. 
 

Key Responsibilities:

• Opportunity Identification and Framing: Collaborate with functions and functional use case champions to frame AI opportunities, outlining business objectives, feasibility, expected value, data needs, and success metrics.

• Governance Leadership: Establish and lead AI governance structures within Commercial functions, ensuring alignment with Gilead and Kite priorities, data policies, regulatory standards, and ethical principles.

• Prioritization and Portfolio Oversight: Evaluate and prioritize AI initiatives based on strategic fit, business readiness, and value potential; maintain a living portfolio of AI use cases with defined milestones and KPIs – with inputs from the council. 

• Proof of Concept (PoC) Management: Partner with Gilead IT and functional teams to design, execute, and monitor projects. Document learnings and outcomes to inform go/no-go governance decisions and scaling roadmaps.

• Value Measurement and Reporting: Develop and track KPIs to assess business impact of AI initiatives; report insights and progress to executive sponsors and governance boards.

• Leadership Alignment: Support Leadership alignment on Key AI initiatives for the commercial functions including value story and resource alignment

• Enterprise Governance Support: Deliver regular updates and recommendations to the Kite AI Governance Board and Gilead/Kite Leadership, highlighting value delivered, risks mitigated, and opportunities for acceleration.

• AI Literacy and GenAI Enablement: Lead AI literacy programs and promote employee productivity through responsible adoption of Generative AI tools across the enterprise.

• Innovation and Community Building: Drive a culture of continuous innovation through hackathons, knowledge-sharing sessions, ideation forums, and coordination of an active AI Community of Practice within Kite. 

• Forecasting: Leverage primary and secondary research insights and team inputs to design and build accurate, actionable, and evidenced based forecasting models. The forecaster will also produce analogues, formulate assumptions, and define opportunities and risks associated with the forecast.

• Performance Tracking: Develop and maintain a dashboard for tracking performance of each product. Develop a mechanism for identifying variations in performance vs. target, and gathering relevant data to help evaluate and determine next steps. Synthesize market dynamics to identify potential drivers impacting performance to inform marketing and sales decisions.

• Secondary Data Analysis: Define analytical priorities in collaboration with rest of the commercial organization. Ensure successful execution of secondary analytics projects and integrating results with primary market research and latest competitive intelligence into actionable insights.

• Collaboration: Partner closely with FP&A, supply chain and other corporate fun