AI Product Senior Manager

Job Description

Recruiter: Sowmya Reddy

Hiring Manager: Jim Tanner

Career Grade: C

Internal Closing Date: 29-05-2026

About the role

The AI Product Senior Manager owns the strategy, lifecycle and business facing product management of a number of BT’s AI platforms and reusable AI services. The role ensures that these products are created with customer impact, value realisation, safety, and cost efficiency in mind. It acts as the primary interface between BT’s AI platform capability and one or two internal customers across CFUs, Networks and Group units, but can offer advisory capabilities on AI suitability and capability adoption to other areas.

This role contributes to judicious product decisions including reuse vs build, prioritisation across demand, and recommendations to proceed, pause or retire AI enabler capabilities. The role provides business facing advisory and ensures AI enablers reduce duplication, accelerate value, and align with market and industry best practice.

What you’ll be doing

Leadership & Vision
• Define and own product vision and strategy for BT AI enablement platforms and reusable AI capabilities.
• Align AI products with BT enterprise AI strategy, Big Bets, regulatory needs and emerging tech trends.

Product Strategy & Roadmap
• Prioritise features and investments based on value, safety, cost, reuse potential, demand and compliance.
• Make trade-off decisions balancing speed, cost, feasibility and value.

Lifecycle Ownership
• Own end-to-end lifecycle: discovery, design, build, deployment, adoption, evolution and retirement.
• Embed capable AI, governance, data dependencies and observability into lifecycle management.
• Drive consistent lifecycle practices across Digital and CFUs.

Business-facing AI Product Management
• Act as key interface for one or two CFUs, Networks and Group units.
• Translate business needs into platform requirements and ensure use-case success.
• Guide CFUs on effective adoption of AI enablers.

Reuse vs Build vs Buy Decisions
• Own decisions on reuse, build or vendor solutions, balancing cost, speed and capability.
• Maximise reuse across CFUs, avoiding duplication and inconsistency.
• Partner with Engineering to enable reusable assets, templates and APIs.

AI Safety, Risk & Compliance
• Embed capable AI into product design and architecture.
• Ensure governance (auditability, explainability, oversight, kill-switch) is built into products.
• Collaborate with Governance to anticipate and embed regulatory changes.

Data Readiness & Dependencies
• Align AI products with BT data strategy, access, quality and controls.
• Identify and escalate data dependencies impacting product performance.

Cost & Efficiency Management
• Manage cost-performance trade-offs across features.
• Ensure efficient compute usage, scalable design and low operational overhead.
• Own TCO and helps financial planning for AI enablers.

Cross-functional Integration
Partner with:
• AI Platform Engineering for scalable enabler components.
• Forward-Deployed AI Engineering to maximise customer value.
• Senior Manager, Delivery for planning and milestones.
• Senior Manager, Governance & Financials for risk and compliance alignment.

People Leadership & Culture
• Build and lead a product team with strong engineering, commercial and design skills.
• Promote high product standards, evidence-based prioritisation and safe-by-design thinking.

KPIs – Success Measures
• High adoption of AI enablers across Digital and CFUs.
• Reduced duplication of AI tools and patterns.
• Faster delivery and reduced cycle time for AI use cases.
• Strong governance-by-design integration.
• Increased reuse and standardisation.
• Improved cost efficiency in AI delivery.

Essential Skills / Experience

• Proven leadership in product management for platforms, developer tooling or AI/ML capabilities.
• Deep understanding of AI/ML lifecycle, agentic workflows, orchestration, LLMs and model evaluation.
• Demonstrated ability to translate complex technical or regulatory requirements into workable product roadmaps.
• Strong communication skills; able to simplify and articulate complex concepts.

Desirable Skills / Experience

• Experience with hyperscaler AI ecosystems and enterprise-scale AI platforms.
• Strong commercial judgement, including cost-performance trade-offs.
• Knowledge of emerging AI regulations, capable AI practices and model governance.
• Background in MLOps, platform engineering or developer experience.
• Experience driving adoption of shared platforms in complex federated organisation

BT Group is the UK’s leading communications group and the holding company behind some of the country’s most recognised brands – including BT, EE, Openreach and Plusnet. Our purpose is as simple as it is ambitious: we connect for good. Our customers include consumers, small, medium and large businesses, public sector organisations and other communications providers.

BT Group’s role is about setting direction, unlocking value and creating the conditions for our brands and businesses to thrive.

Having come through the most capital-intensive phase of our fibre investment, our focus now is on what comes next – simplifying how we operate, using technology and AI to work smarter, and organising ourselves to serve customers better and grow sustainably. Group teams shape strategy, policy, brand, capital allocation and transformation, helping the whole organisation perform at its best.

We have a singular culture that unites all our people: we are customer-first challengers, who are committed, clear and connected. These behaviours unite us as one team to deliver for our colleagues, our customers, our stakeholders and the country. Joining BT Group means working at the heart of a business that matters to the UK, with the opportunity to shape decisions, influence outcomes and help set the future course of one of the country’s most important companies.