AI Innovation Lead

Forvis Mazars is a leading global professional services network providing audit & assurance, tax, and advisory services. Forvis Mazars in the UK spans 14 offices across the nation and has over 3,400 professionals, with 190 partners. We have a clear purpose and a shared commitment to shape a better future.

You'll join a collaborative and inclusive team where you're supported to grow your skills, explore new opportunities, and contribute from day one. You'll work with a diverse client base, develop meaningful connections, and gain experience that extends beyond your local team. Together, we grow, belong and impact. #LI-DNP

About the role

The role will be responsible for driving AI technical conversations, developing practical routes forward with the business, and helping translate AI strategy into scalable solutions, platforms and use cases. The successful candidate will work closely with the UK service line teams, IT, data and risk teams to ensure AI initiatives are technically robust and aligned to business value. This role is intended for a professional, with strong hands-on technical credibility, enterprise delivery experience and the ability to influence senior stakeholders as part of the firmwide AI strategy.

Leadership

• Provide technical leadership across AI initiatives, supporting the delivery of the firm’s AI strategy and transformation priorities.

• Act as a trusted technical adviser to senior stakeholders, helping shape realistic and pragmatic routes forward for AI adoption.

• Support prioritisation of AI use cases by assessing technical feasibility, delivery complexity, risk and potential business value.

• Work with UK and international teams to share good practice, align approaches and support scalable delivery across jurisdictions.

• Coach and support colleagues involved in AI delivery.

AI Strategy and Roadmap Support

• Contribute to the development and delivery of the firm’s AI roadmap, with particular focus on technical architecture, delivery planning and platform readiness.

• Translate strategic priorities into practical delivery plans, solution designs and implementation options.

• Provide informed insight on emerging AI technologies, including generative AI, agentic systems, automation, model orchestration and enterprise AI platforms.

• Identify opportunities to improve productivity, quality, client experience and operational effectiveness through AI-enabled solutions.

• Help assess where AI should be built, bought, configured or integrated, taking account of risk, cost, scalability and maintainability.

• Work with service lines and business teams to shape, prototype and deliver high-value AI use cases. Support the management of the AI use case pipeline from ideation to scaled deployment and adoption.

• Partner with product owners and change teams to embed AI into business processes and ways of working.

• Support ongoing monitoring, iteration and improvement of AI products once deployed.

• Help evidence value realisation, including efficiency, quality, risk reduction, adoption and user experience measures.

AI Platforms

• Support the technical design of AI solutions. Work with IT and enterprise architecture teams to ensure AI solutions align with approved cloud, data, security and integration standards.

• Support deployment of AI models, applications, workflows and services using appropriate software engineering practices.

• Advise on the use of enterprise platforms, including Microsoft Azure AI services, Microsoft 365 Copilot and other approved AI technologies.

• Define practical approaches for testing, monitoring, performance measurement and continuous improvement of AI solutions.

• Ensure technical solutions are scalable, secure, maintainable and suitable for use in a regulated professional services environment.

• Help define reusable technical patterns (or buckets), templates and standards for AI delivery.

• Ensure AI solutions are designed with maintainability, supportability and operational resilience in mind.

Value and Prioritisation

• Assess AI opportunities against strategic alignment, technical feasibility, risk, delivery effort and measurable value.

• Support business cases for AI investment by providing clear technical options, delivery assumptions and implementation considerations.

• Track delivery progress and help communicate the value of AI initiatives to stakeholders.

• Identify opportunities to reuse components, platforms and patterns to improve efficiency and reduce duplication.

• Balance pace of delivery with appropriate risk management, governance and technical quality.

What we are looking for

• Experience translating business problems into scalable technical solutions and delivery plans. Clear examples of driving or generating business value at scale.

• Ability to lead technical conversations with both engineering teams and non-technical senior stakeholders.

• Experience working with cloud-based AI platforms, preferably Microsoft Azure AI, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Power Platform or comparable enterprise technologies.

• Technical experience delivering AI, machine learning, generative AI or advanced analytics solutions in an enterprise environment.

• Hands-on understanding of AI solution architecture, including model integration, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), prompt engineering, orchestration, evaluation and deployment.

• Experience working with risk, compliance, information security or data protection teams in relation to AI or data-led solutions.

• Proven ability to work across multidisciplinary teams and influence without relying solely on formal authority.

• Understanding of accountancy, audit, tax, advisory or professional services environments is highly desirable.

• Experience working with international teams or across multiple jurisdictions is desirable.

• Technically credible, curious and able to stay close to rapidly evolving AI capabilities.

• Pragmatic and outcome focused, with the judgement to balance innovation, risk and delivery pace.

• Clear communicator who can explain complex AI concepts in practical business language.

• Collaborative and confident working across different business areas, technology, risk and international teams.

• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and turning ideas into structured technical options.

• Strong delivery and client experience mindset with attention to quality, governance and measurable impact.

• Positive, resilient and able to build trust with stakeholders at different levels of seniority.

• Behaviours consistent with firm values.

Ready to grow, belong, and impact? Apply now and join us at Forvis Mazars!

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

At Forvis Mazars diversity, equity and inclusion are central to our values. We value our people's unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experience, and know this diversity create better outcomes for our clients. We seek to attract, develop, and retain the best talent, inclusive of sex, ethnicity, disability, socio-economic background, sexual orientation, gender identity, nationality, and faith. We select candidates based on skills, knowledge, qualifications, and experience and aim to support all our team members to reach their potential. At Forvis Mazars, we promote an environment in which you can grow your skills, belong to a team that values your ideas, and make an impact that matters.