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Salary: USD 221,200 - 387,100 / annual
ServiceNow's Applied AI Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team is seeking a Principal, AI Deployment Strategist to own global resource allocation and portfolio strategy for the organization's agentic AI engagements with Fortune 500 customers. This is a strategist-operator role sitting at the intersection of GTM, sales, product, and delivery—not a coordination function.
You will own the FDE global deployment and portfolio strategy, working with regional leadership, Geo Presidents, and senior GTM stakeholders to calibrate where FDE delivers maximum impact on revenue, product signal, and customer reference value. You'll navigate competing priorities across regions and strategic accounts, making allocation decisions that maximize team impact globally.
Key responsibilities include:
**FDE Investment Strategy & ROI Operations**: Treat every FDE engagement as a capital investment. Approve only work tied to clear strategic imperatives (renewals, net-new ACV, product expansion). Set approval criteria that withstand CFO scrutiny, lock scope and success criteria upfront, and track engagements through to measurable results. Measure renewals, net-new ACV, consumption, and expansion influenced per FDE-week by engagement type, region, and industry to steer future deployment and headcount decisions.
**Value Velocity & Build Economics**: Compress the cycle from use case identification to value definition and executive sign-off. Build repeatable playbooks that move engagements from "interesting problem" to "approved investment with quantified outcomes" faster. Scale these playbooks across the portfolio so every FDE engagement benefits from consistent velocity and rigor.
**Evolving Initiatives & Scale Path Orchestration**: Stay close to portfolio performance signals. Own emerging initiatives defining FDE's next frontier—agentic use cases, go-to-market motions, industry verticals, platform capabilities. Build scale paths that turn early wins into portfolio-wide capability. Define partner motions that extend FDE reach while maintaining caliber, including vetting standards, engagement models, and quality guardrails for tier-1 SIs and specialist partners.
**Executive Narrative & Senior Relationship Alignment**: Drive how FDE impact shows up at the highest levels—board narratives, Financial Analyst Day, C-suite QBRs, marquee customer references. Own the throughline from raw deployment outcomes to market-moving narratives.
**Adaptive Leadership**: The AI market shifts rapidly. Read field signals in real time and move mountains internally to ensure the team leans into what's landing and pulls back from what isn't. Pattern-match across the portfolio, identify the highest-leverage deployment decision each week, and solve it at expert caliber.
This role requires comfort with ambiguity, speed, and the ability to operate across GTM planning sessions and tactical capacity trade-offs. You'll have executive presence to hold rooms with senior sales and product leadership, with deep ownership of outcomes over scope.
**Requirements**:
- 12+ years of experience spanning AI GTM, applied AI or technical solutioning, management consulting, or strategic delivery in a Fortune 500 environment
- Track record of personally owning complex, multi-stakeholder GTM and deployment decisions with C-suite and senior executive partners (ownership, not coordination)
- Demonstrated fluency in agentic AI, LLM-based systems, or applied AI builds; enough technical depth to challenge scope, pressure-test architecture, and credibly engage customer and internal engineering leadership
- Experience designing and scaling commercial frameworks, capacity models, or strategic allocation constructs that have withstood CFO and procurement scrutiny
- History of managing portfolios or programs that scaled beyond individual reach; resource allocation decisions that moved the needle across a region or function
- Judgment to identify which deployment decision deserves focus each quarter and operating instinct to solve it without waiting for directive
