Principal Financial Group
Website:
principal.com
Job details:
Responsibilities
About the AI Innovation Lab
The AI Innovation Lab enables rapid testing of new AI ideas to validate their
technical feasibility and business value. A critical input into this process is strong
outside‑in research—understanding market trends, emerging technologies, competitor moves, and evolving best practices to ensure the Lab’s backlog and POCs are forward‑looking, relevant, and strategically aligned.
Role Overview
This role leads the end-to-end AI innovation engine, connecting enterprise strategy to rapid experimentation and measurable business outcomes. Responsible for translating executive priorities into a prioritized AI portfolio, orchestrating cross-functional teams through rapid innovation cycles, and ensuring concepts move from ideation to POC to execution at a rapid pace.
Operates at the intersection of business strategy, operating model design, and AI delivery, ensuring that innovation is not isolated but embedded into how the organization drives growth, efficiency, and transformation.
- Requires simultaneous fluency in strategy, finance, and AI delivery (not sequential handoffs)
- Must drive executive alignment and funding decisions in parallel with experimentation
- Owns portfolio-level value realization, not just individual use cases
- Balances speed (weeks) with governance and enterprise integration
- Aligned with emerging AI trends and agentic patterns in the market to bring this expertise to the innovation lab
What You Will Do
- AI Strategy to Execution Translation
- Translate enterprise strategy into a prioritized AI innovation backlog (core, emerging, transformative)
- Define value hypotheses, ROI models, and success metrics for each use case
- Ensure alignment to business priorities and executive sponsorship before build
- Innovation Lab Leadership
- Lead rapid experimentation cycles (4–8 weeks) from ideation through POC validation
- Establish and govern intake, prioritization, and stage-gate decision frameworks
- Drive disciplined decision-making on
- what enters the lab
- what scales
- what stops
- Operating Model & Transformation Design
- Design AI-enabled operating models, including workforce, processes, and governance
- Ensure solutions are structured for repeatability, reuse, and enterprise scale
- Embed AI into broader business model and go-to-market transformation
- Executive Stakeholder Leadership
- Partner with C-suite, functional and BU leaders to
- Define business cases for funding and sponsorship
- Align on priorities and trade-offs
- Drive adoption and change
- Act as translator between business ambition and technical reality
- Value Realization & Scaling
- Ensure POCs deliver quantifiable business impact (cost, revenue, CX)
- Define pathways to execution factory / production deployment
- Track and communicate enterprise-level value realization (~$MM impact)
Qualifications
Who You Are:
- Bringing a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree - B.E. / B.Tech / M.S. / M.Tech / MCA degree in Computer Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics or a related subject area
- 12–18+ years across strategy, transformation, and technology delivery
- Proven experience leading enterprise-scale transformation programs
- Direct experience with:
- AI / GenAI strategy and use case development
- Operating model redesign
- Business case development and investment governance
- Background spanning consulting + industry leadership strongly preferred
Skills That Will Help You Stand Out
- Moves seamlessly from boardroom strategy to sprint execution
- Deep expertise in value framing, prioritization, and portfolio governance
- Ability to drive behavior change and adoption, not just design solutions
- Experience building repeatable innovation engines, not one-off pilots
Additional Information
Why Join the AI Innovation Lab?
- Work across a diverse set of high‑impact AI ideas rather than a single long‑lived pipeline.
- Operate in a fast‑paced, learning‑first environment that values pragmatism over perfection.
- Directly influence how quickly AI ideas move from concept to validated proof points.
Our Engineering Culture
Through our Agile/Lean DevOps environment dedicated to delivering valuable solutions, we’ve fostered a culture of innovation and experimentation across our development teams. As a customer-focused organization, we work closely with our end users and product owners to understand and rapidly respond to emerging business needs.
Collaboration is embedded into everything we do – from the products we develop to the quality service we provide. We’re driven by the belief that diversity of thought, background, and perspective is critical to creating the best products and experiences for our customers.
Click on Apply to know more.