Senior Finance Business Partner

About the role

This highly visible role sits within the Digital Finance team and reports into a Digital Finance Director.

We are looking for a commercially sharp, technically minded Senior finance business partner for AI. You’ll play a central role in shaping the technological and cultural AI strategy through cultivating the commercial decision-making and outcomes that AI delivers for BT.

This truly cross-functional role will need to bridge finance, technology and operational teams to optimise AI usage and spend, drive financial transparency and accountability to maximise value for BT and its customers.

What you’ll be doing

Leadership & Vision:

• Provide senior leaders with authoritative insight and decision support for AI cost exposure and financial projections and impacts
• Drive cultural enablement through design and promotion of AI framework best practices across teams to foster shared accountability for AI costs and embed cost-awareness into AI adoption and full AI lifecycle
• Drive AI literacy within Finance and promote date-driven decision making and financial awareness across Digital and the CFUs

AI Financial Stewardship:

• Finance business case owner for AI Big Bets, working with finance leads in execution areas
• Track and interrogate AI spend, identifying cost optimising opportunities through model, platform or infrastructure optimisation
• Build transparent dashboards to report AI cost and action insights to stakeholders
• Collaborate with operational teams to build accurate AI spend forecasts and budgets
• Lead cost governance processes ensuring that teams operate within approved financial envelopes
• Own process of identifying and declaring AI outcome and benefits realisation across BT Group

AI Financial modelling & Value Assessment:

• Own financial evaluation of AI initiatives including cost modelling, value estimation, ROI projections and affordability analysis.
• Build and own accurate modelling of:
  • compute cost (token usage, latency, traffic scaling)
  • build vs buy economics
  • platform cost impacts
  • savings or benefit realisation
  • Provide financial inputs into prioritisation and sequencing decisions

• compute cost (token usage, latency, traffic scaling)
• build vs buy economics
• platform cost impacts
• savings or benefit realisation
• Provide financial inputs into prioritisation and sequencing decisions

KPIs / What Success Looks Like:

• Accurate, trusted financial models informing prioritisation and investment decisions
• Strong financial discipline and cost optimisation in AI-related spend and compute usage
• Strong link between AI activity and value realisation across BT Group
• Financial governance artefacts widely adopted and consistently applied

Essential Skills / Experience

• Qualified finance professional with relevant technology finance experience: Fully qualified accountant (ACA, ACCA, CIMA or equivalent) and or significant experience in financial planning, cost optimisation and/or technology finance within a complex, cross-functional environment.
• Financial modelling and data analytics capability: Strong financial modelling skills and commercial acumen, with the ability to interpret AI usage telemetry and billing data structures and use analytical tools such as advanced Excel and SQL to support robust decision-making.
• Senior stakeholder influence, communication and collaboration: Proven ability to build effective pan-BT relationships, set clear direction and work across finance, technical and operational teams, using clear written and verbal communication to provide decision support, challenge senior stakeholders and articulate choices, risks and shared outcomes.

Desirable Skills / Experience

• Familiarity with platform cost drivers (compute, token use, inference cost models)
• Experience working with data pipelines, vector databases or machine learning infrastruture
• Knowledge of UK/EU AI regulatory expectations (AI Act, data protection, safety rules)
• Certifications: FinOps Certified Practitioner (FOCP) or similar designation preferred

Our Package

Tailored benefits make a real difference. That’s why we offer a comprehensive range to support your growth, wellbeing, and everyday life. You can design the package to suit you and your lifestyle. Your core benefits include:

• Company car scheme (or cash alternative)
• 15% on target annual bonus
• Private healthcare for you and your family
• Access to an online private GP 24/7 for you and your immediate family
• Market-leading paid carers leave with up to 2 weeks off
• Equalised maternity, paternity, and adoption leave – 18 weeks’ full pay and 8 weeks’ half pay
• Discounted EE and BT products, including mobile and broadband
• Market leading Pension scheme – 5% from you and 10% from us
• Holiday purchase scheme

You can select additional benefits, including healthcare, dental, gym memberships and more when you’re ready.

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.