Job Summary:The AI Opportunity Development Lead plays a critical role in ensuring BJ's AI initiatives are grounded in real business impact and executed with disciplined prioritization. Reporting to the Director of AI Strategy & Governance, this role works closely with business leaders, product managers, data teams, and AI/ML engineers to translate operational opportunities into well-defined AI initiatives with clear business value.
You will help shape AI opportunities across merchandising, supply chain, club operations, digital experience, and corporate functions. Your focus will be on identifying high-value use cases, developing practical business cases, structuring pilot program objectives, and ensuring initiatives are measured against clear success metrics.
This role sits within the centralized AI Strategy & Enablement function and acts as a bridge between business domains and technology teams. The function does not directly build or operate AI solutions; instead, it helps ensure AI investments are aligned with enterprise strategy, coordinated across domains, and developed in partnership with the teams responsible for delivery. This role succeeds through influence and facilitation-it carries no direct delivery authority over engineering or product teams.
The ideal candidate combines strong strategic thinking with practical familiarity with modern AI capabilities (including machine learning, generative AI, and emerging agent-based workflows), allowing them to assess where AI can meaningfully improve business outcomes.
Key Responsibilities:AI Opportunity Identification and Evaluation
- Partner with AI Champions across merchandising, supply chain, clubs, digital, and corporate functions to identify AI opportunities that improve growth, margin performance, operational precision, and member experience.
- Evaluate potential use cases with a practical understanding of AI capabilities (including machine learning, generative AI, and agentic workflows) and assess where AI is the right solution versus traditional analytics or process improvement.
- Facilitate structured discovery sessions with appropriate business and product teams to help teams clarify problems, define hypotheses, determine data readiness, and connect related initiatives across departments.
- Stay current on AI technologies and industry applications, translating emerging capabilities into practical opportunities for BJ's business functions.
Business Case Development, Prioritization, and Value Realization
- Develop disciplined business cases for AI initiatives, including expected value, feasibility, implementation effort, and operational readiness.
- Work with business and finance partners to estimate potential impact on revenue, margin, productivity, or cost reduction.
- Define and track metrics that measure business impact, and support enterprise reporting on AI initiative progress and value realization.
Pilot Design and Experimentation
- Support business and technology teams in structuring proofs of concept and pilot objectives that validate feasibility and value before larger investments.
- Define clear objectives, success criteria, and evaluation frameworks; ensure pilots generate actionable insights and capture lessons learned to inform scaling decisions.
Collaboration with Product and Engineering Teams
- Partner closely with product managers, data engineers, and AI/ML engineering teams to ensure AI initiatives align with the systems, workflows, and platforms where solutions will ultimately operate.
- Help clarify business problems, define measurable outcomes, and structure pilots - while leaving technical solution design and delivery ownership with the appropriate engineering and product organizations.
Professional Experience / Qualifications:- 6-9 years of experience in strategy, analytics, product management, management consulting, digital transformation, or experience leading AI/ML-enabled product or program initiatives in a business environment
- Ability to assess whether AI is the right solution for a given problem, ask the right questions of technical teams, and recognize when a use case lacks the data foundation or feasibility to proceed
- Experience collaborating with data science, product, and engineering teams on AI or advanced analytics initiatives
- Demonstrated experience developing business cases, defining success metrics, and evaluating ROI for new technology initiatives
- Proven ability to drive alignment and decisions across business, product, and technology stakeholders without direct delivery authority
- Bachelor's degree required
- Demonstrated curiosity and continuous learning in the rapidly evolving AI landscape
In accordance with the Pay Transparency requirements, the following represents a good faith estimate of the compensation range for this position. At BJ's Wholesale Club, we carefully consider a wide range of non-discriminatory factors when determining salary. Actual salaries will vary depending on factors including but not limited to location, education, experience, and qualifications. The pay range for this position is
$146,250 - $181,500This is a hybrid role. Tuesday through Thursday are in-office days at BJ's Club Support Center in Marlborough, MA and Monday and Friday are remote days.
