Head of AI | Datacom
Our Why
Datacom works with organisations and communities across Australia and New Zealand to make a difference in people's lives and help organisations use the power of tech to make it all happen.
About the Role
We're looking for a Head of AI LAB who is equal parts strategist, builder, and relationship maker. This is not a role for someone who wants to sit in a corner and experiment with models. This is a senior, visible, and genuinely challenging role at the heart of one of ANZ's largest technology companies.
You'll be the person who makes AI real at Datacom — for our clients, our teams, and our business. That means bringing people with you, building products that actually sell, and knowing enough about the technology to call a bad idea what it is.
If you thrive in complexity, love people as much as you love technology, and want to build something that matters — read on.
What You'll Do
Stakeholder Management — The Real Kind
This role lives or dies on relationships. You'll be working across every part of Datacom — and not everyone will roll out the welcome mat straight away. You'll need to earn trust, navigate competing priorities, and bring people on a journey they didn't always ask to go on.
Working across the Lines of Business
- Build genuine, lasting partnerships with Datacom's LoB leaders — Managed Services, Cloud, Consulting, Enterprise Solutions, and Professional Services.
- Understand what each business is trying to achieve commercially and operationally — and find the AI angle that actually helps them get there
- Be the person LoB Managers call when they have an AI Toolset question, an opportunity, or a problem they don't know how to solve
- Run structured AI governance forums and working sessions that LoB leaders actually find valuable — not just another meeting in the calendar
- Present AI LAB strategy, progress, and investment recommendations to Leadership Team's across Datacom
- Some teams won't want to engage — whether through scepticism, competing priorities, or past experience with AI initiatives that didn't deliver - welcome to the challenges
- Build credibility through consistency, follow-through, and genuine outcomes — not just enthusiasm
Product & Go-To-Market — Build Things That Actually Sell
There's no shortage of AI Ideas at Datacom. What we need is someone who can take the best of those ideas and turn them into products that win in the market — products that our own teams want to put into projects for our external customers as well as for our internal work.
Building Commercial AI Products
- Lead the development of Datacom's AI product portfolio — from the first whiteboard session through to commercial launch and iteration
- Work closely with Product, Engineering, and Design to shape offerings that are genuinely differentiated — not just features dressed up as products
- Define clear value propositions that resonate with buyers — focused on outcomes, not technology for technology's sake
- Build the business case rigour that gives the organisation confidence to invest — and the commercial model that makes it worth investing in
Winning in the Market
- Deeply understand the ANZ AI market — where it is now, where it's going, and where Datacom has a genuine right to win
- Shape go-to-market strategies that are realistic, targeted, and built on customer insight rather than internal assumption
- Identify the verticals — Government, Health, Financial Services, Retail — where Datacom's AI products will land hardest and fastest
- Stay close to the competitive landscape and ensure Datacom's positioning is sharp, honest, and compelling
Making Datacom Teams Love What You Build
- Partner closely with our Teams to ensure AI products are easy to understand, easy to position, and easy to sell
- Create the collateral, the narratives, and the proof points that gives teams genuine confidence in the field
- Be accessible — the kind of product leader who shows up to client conversations, supports bids, and helps close deals
- Gather post-sale and post-launch feedback relentlessly — and use it to make things better
AI Technology — Know Enough to Matter
You don't need to be the best data scientist in the room. But you do need to be the person who knows when something is genuinely promising and when someone is selling you a dream. In this role, you'll be surrounded by people who live and breathe AI technology — and by senior stakeholders who will expect you to hold your own in every conversation.
Technology Credibility
- Maintain a deep enough understanding of AI/ML, LLMs, foundation models, and agentic systems to make sound technology judgements
- Know how to spot a bad idea — whether it's an overhyped vendor pitch, an architecture that won't scale, or an automation play that solves the wrong problem
- Engage authentically with Datacom's technical AI teams — earning their respect not through authority, but through genuine understanding and intellectual curiosity
- Be the person who asks the right questions in a technical discussion and knows what to do with the answers
Agentic AI & Automation
- Understand the shift happening right now toward agentic AI — multi-agent systems, autonomous workflows, and AI that doesn't just respond but acts
- Drive Datacom's capability in intelligent automation — including document processing, workflow automation, conversational AI, and process intelligence
- Oversee the integration of LLMs, RAG pipelines, and agentic frameworks (AutoGen, LangChain, CrewAI) into Datacom products and client solutions
- Ensure Datacom's AI technology choices are sound, scalable, secure, and commercially sensible
Staying Current — For Real
- This is a field that moves fast. Really fast. You'll need to invest the time to stay genuinely current — not just across headlines, but across the technology, the vendors, the research, and the use cases
- Be the person in the room who has already read the paper, tried the tool, and formed a view — not the one catching up
- Build a culture of continuous AI learning across Datacom — because your credibility as Head of AI LAB depends partly on the capability of the team and organisation around you
What You'll Bring
- Senior leadership experience in AI, technology, or a related field — with the scars to prove it
- A natural relationship builder — someone who can work a room, navigate resistance, and build trust across every level of a large organisation
- Real commercial instincts — you understand what makes a product succeed, how to take it to market, and what sales teams need to win
- Genuine technical credibility in AI — not necessarily the deepest technical expert, but someone who has done the work to understand the technology and keeps doing it
- Comfort presenting and influencing at executive and board level — clear, confident, and able to simplify without dumbing down
- Experience in complex, matrixed organisations where you've had to lead through influence rather than authority
- A bias for action — someone who moves things forward, makes decisions with imperfect information, and learns fast
Why Datacom?
At Datacom we value our people and provide a collaborative environment that supports career development and growth.
We offer:
- Flexible & hybrid working arrangements
- Competitive salary + company benefits
- A genuinely senior platform to shape AI across one of ANZ's largest tech companies
- The complexity, scale, and ambiguity that makes a role like this worth doing
- A diverse and inclusive culture where different perspectives are not just welcomed — they're needed
- Real career development and the support to keep growing