About the RoleEvery week, an executive at one of our largest clients walks into a room with the same question. "We've spent millions on AI pilots. Why hasn't anything changed in how my team actually works?"
The reason is almost never the model. It's the workflow. The pilots solved a demo, not a job. Nobody mapped how work actually happens. Nobody owned the rollout past launch. Nobody iterated when adoption stalled.
That's what AI Strategists at Tenex are hired to fix. You own the engagement from the first executive conversation to the moment the workflow you built becomes the way the team runs. You partner with Forward-Deployed Engineers to ship the work, not just spec it. You sit with the CEO one hour and the warehouse manager the next, and you stay honest with both.
Your scope shifts weekly because the technology shifts weekly. We expect you to live at the frontier of agentic AI as a daily practitioner, because your credibility with clients depends on it.
The goal is simple to state and hard to hit: the clients we work with should become measurably more AI-native, measured by adoption of the workflows we ship and the business outcomes they drive. Nothing else really counts.
This role reports to an Engagement Manager alongside Forward-Deployed Engineers, and our partner teams at Anthropic, OpenAI, Vercel, and beyond. Plan on traveling to client sites about once a month.
What You'll DoA few engagements in flight today, to give you a sense of the work:
- A national insurer wants to know the ten highest-ROI AI bets across claims, underwriting, and customer ops. The Strategist leading the engagement runs a four-week diagnostic, delivers an executive-ready roadmap, and stays on to ship the first two.
- A healthcare system has the data but not the workflow. A two-week sprint to design the agent, a partnership with engineering to prototype it, and a rollout across three hospitals run by the Strategist on point.
- A private equity firm wants AI fluency operationalized across every portfolio company. One Strategist builds the playbook, runs the trainings, and develops the internal champions who own it after Tenex leaves.
Across engagements, you'll:
- Own the relationship at the C-suite level. You're the person the CEO calls when something matters, and the person who tells them the hard truth when the answer is uncomfortable
- Run AI strategy audits that surface how work actually happens (not how people say it happens), quantify what's broken, and rank the bets worth making
- Design and run sprints that move strategy, product, and technical decisions from quarters into weeks
- Build the workflows alongside Forward-Deployed Engineers, hands-on, using off-the-shelf SaaS, low-code platforms, and frontier agentic tooling
- Drive adoption past launch, because shipping a workflow nobody uses is the same as not shipping
- Turn what you learn in the field into the playbooks the rest of the firm uses on the next engagement
What You'll Bring- 5 to 10 years at the intersection of strategy, operations, product, or workflow design, ideally in consulting, an AI-native company, or a fast-growth startup
- A track record of redesigning a workflow or process, formally or informally. You can walk through exactly what you changed, why, and what happened as a result
- Daily, hands-on use of the modern agentic AI stack (Claude, Cowork, ChatGPT, Cursor, Lovable, Zapier/n8n, and whatever ships next week). You're not just aware of these tools, you're building with them across multiple contexts every day
- Strong discovery instincts. You know how to ask the questions that surface how work actually happens
- Credible with executives and engineers in equal measure. You translate fuzzy client demands into actionable technical direction, and engineering jargon into clear "here's what that means for you" language back to the client
- A bias to ship. You see a workflow three people are doing manually and you automate it before the next standup
- High ownership, low ego, and a builder's instinct
Bonus Points- Background as Chief of Staff, ops lead, PM at an AI-forward company, management consultant (McKinsey Digital, BCG X, Bain Vector), service designer (IDEO, Fjord), or founder
- Published writing, public speaking, or other public artifacts of your point of view on applied AI
CompensationBase salary is
$150,000 to $180,000. Strategists also earn a
performance-based discretionary bonus paid quarterly, tied to engagement outcomes, client impact, and contributions to the practice. Target total cash meaningfully exceeds base. Compensation may also include equity and other long-term incentives.
Benefits- Comprehensive medical (PPO and HSA options), dental, and vision
- HSA, Healthcare FSA, and Commuter Benefits
- 100% employer-paid life insurance + AD&D
- 100% employer-paid long-term disability insurance
- Responsible PTO. Take what you need.
Our WorkplaceWe work in person from our New York City office five days a week. The best ideas come from being in the same room. Faster collaboration, real-time problem solving, stronger relationships, sharper execution.
