Head of AI

Key Responsibilities will include :

• Lead enterprise rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot, ensuring adoption models reflect best practices for AI‑enhanced productivity, role‑specific training, safe usage guidelines, and incremental value realisation.
• Identify high‑impact workflow opportunities where Copilot can reduce cognitive load, accelerate document creation, improve analytics and decision support, and streamline communication across functions.
• Partner with Banking Value Streams to design ‘AI‑augmented roles’ and embed Copilot into daily workflows (meetings, analysis, customer service, operations).
• Build and scale an agentic / automation capability that blends RPA, workflow orchestration, generative AI agents, and API‑driven automation—reflecting industry guidance that financial services must converge AI and RPA to achieve end‑to‑end automation.
• Lead development of automated processes using RPA, intelligent document processing, conversational AI, and agentic orchestration frameworks.
• Establish automation opportunity pipelines, value cases, and engineering patterns that reduce cost, reduce cycle times, and improve operational resilience.
• Oversee technical design, architecture, and deployment of agentic workflows in partnership with Engineering, Data, InfoSec, and Operations teams.
• Define the bank’s AI vision, roadmap, capability model, and operating architecture—aligned with modern Head of AI responsibilities around strategy, R&D, and platform capability building.
• Translate strategy into measurable outcomes, KPIs, and investment cases including value delivery from Copilot, automation, agentic workflows, and risk‑controlled AI implementation.
• Evaluate, select, and govern enterprise AI tools, platforms, MLOps components, and automation technologies.
• Own enterprise AI governance, including model lifecycle oversight, safety guidelines, explainability, fairness, risk classification, and compliance with tightening AI regulations.
• Implement guardrails that ensure secure, responsible, and transparent usage of AI across the bank.
• Establish ethical standards and acceptable‑use boundaries in line with CTO responsibilities in governance, risk ownership, and executive accountability.
• Build and lead multi‑disciplinary teams across AI engineering, automation, RPA, experimentation, and change adoption, aligned with expectations for senior AI leaders.
• Work closely with Product, CTO, CRO, CPO, Real Estate Finance and Retail to integrate AI into core business operations.
• Communicate AI strategy and delivery outcomes to ExCo and Board; chair or participate in AI governance forums or AI councils.
• Lead prototyping of agentic AI capabilities, safe sandboxing, controlled pilots, and AI‑augmented workflows.
• Track industry developments in generative AI, copilots, LLMs, autonomous workflows, synthetic data, and control frameworks to maintain competitive advantage.
• Foster a culture of continuous experimentation and learning—mirroring the innovation expectations of modern AI leadership roles.

Please be aware that should we pursue your application, all our Financial Services employees will be expected to complete background checks to assess suitability for employment, these include; a criminal record, identity, media, sanctions, adverse finance, fraud prevention and reference checks to comply with our regulatory requirements.

Hodge is an advocate of being an equal opportunities employer, We believe in promoting equality and diversity which is central to our lives today. We welcome applications from all sections of the community and recognises the value a diverse workforce brings to an organisation.

ESG and sustainability are at the heart of everything we do and serves as a reminder of the responsibility we have to our stakeholders, customers, colleagues and the communities we operate in to use our position wisely. We’re currently exploring different certifications available and have done an initial review of how we think we’d fare, as we see this as a real opportunity for Hodge given our social purpose.

Apply today to become part of Hodge’s mission to make life better for customers and society in the moments that matter.