AI Strategist

The Fortune 500 is rebuilding itself right now. Every company over a billion in revenue is asking the same question: what does it mean to run this business if AI does half the work in five years? Most don't know how to answer. That's why they call us.

Tenex is the partner ambitious companies hire when the stakes are too high to get AI wrong. We embed elite teams directly into their operations, find the bets that actually move the business, and ship the work that makes them AI-native. The clients are sharp. The problems are unforgiving. The work has to land.

We get to do this work alongside the people building the frontier. Anthropic and OpenAI are formal partners, and we sit in the room with their Applied AI teams on real client problems. Vercel, Lovable, and a growing list of the most important companies in AI are partners too. We were the partner Anthropic named on the Claude for Small Business launch, delivering AI fluency training across various US cities, and workflows we built ship inside Claude for Small Business today.

The bar for joining is high. We hire people with high agency and high urgency, who care less about where they trained and more about what they've built. If you want to spend the next chapter of your career working on the AI bets that decide where Fortune 500 companies go next, alongside the best operators in the industry and the labs building the technology, this is the place.

Every 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 the Head of Strategy and works alongside Forward-Deployed Engineers, Solution Architects, and our partner teams at Anthropic, OpenAI, Vercel, and beyond. Plan on traveling to client sites about once a month.

A 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

• 3 to 7 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

• 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

You get to work alongside the people building the frontier, not as a downstream integrator but as a peer in the room with Anthropic and OpenAI's Applied AI teams. You get to do it for clients whose AI bets will define the next decade of their industry. The work is real, the consequences are real, and the team you do it with is the kind of group you don't get to assemble twice in a career.

Base 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.

• 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.

We 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.