Head of AI & Process Automation

Location: Bangalore

Work Mode: On-site preferred

Level: Director / VP Equivalent

Reporting To: Chief Business Officer

Role Type: Hands-on Individual Contributor, with scope to build and lead a small team

About the Company

A fast-growing, Bangalore-based real estate organization with significant operations across commercial real estate, residential development, and institutional transactions is building its AI & Process Automation function from the ground up.

This is a founding leadership hire for the function. The mandate is to identify high-value opportunities across the business, build practical AI and automation solutions, drive adoption, and establish the systems and processes required to scale the function.

About the Role

We are looking for a hands-on AI and automation leader who can work directly with business teams to understand how processes actually work, identify where technology can create measurable value, and then build and deploy the solution.

You could be working on anything from automating parts of a commercial leasing workflow to improving a PMO tracker, enhancing deal analysis, streamlining finance processes, or building intelligence into a residential sales pipeline.

This is not a strategy-only AI leadership role. We are looking for someone who can get into the details, build solutions themselves, work with existing systems and tools, and drive adoption across the organization.

The role will initially be highly hands-on, with the opportunity to build and manage a small team as the function scales.

Key Responsibilities

• Audit workflows across commercial leasing, residential sales, PMO, finance, and transactions to identify high-ROI AI and automation opportunities.
• Translate business problems into practical AI, automation, and workflow solutions.
• Build and ship solutions directly using LLM APIs, RAG, automation/workflow platforms, and related technologies.
• Where appropriate, lead a small internal team or external vendors to deliver solutions quickly.
• Evaluate build vs. buy vs. integrate decisions across AI and automation tools.
• Integrate solutions with existing business systems such as CRM, accounting/ERP platforms, and other operational tools.
• Establish foundational data hygiene, documentation, workflows, and systems where required.
• Work closely with business leaders and functional teams to drive adoption of new tools and processes.
• Manage resistance to change and ensure solutions are actually used in day-to-day operations.
• Define and track measurable outcomes such as time saved, process efficiency, cost reduction, throughput, and productivity gains.
• Present impact and progress to senior leadership through clear business metrics.
• Help establish the organization's AI and automation roadmap and operating model from scratch.

What We're Looking For

Must-Have Experience

• Proven track record of personally building and shipping AI-driven tools, products, or automation solutions.
• Experience working within a process-heavy or operationally complex business, such as real estate, financial services, manufacturing, logistics, or a comparable environment.
• Strong hands-on experience with:
• LLM APIs
• RAG / retrieval-based AI applications
• AI agents or intelligent workflows
• Automation/workflow platforms such as n8n, Zapier, Power Automate, or equivalent tools
• Sufficient full-stack capability to take a solution from problem definition → prototype → working implementation, without depending entirely on a separate engineering team.
• Experience integrating technology solutions with existing business/enterprise systems.
• Demonstrated ability to work with non-technical stakeholders, including senior business leaders and functional heads.
• Strong change-management and adoption skills — you should be comfortable convincing teams to change how they work.
• Ability to operate as a hands-on individual contributor at senior leadership level, with the potential to build and manage a small team as the function grows.
• Strong commercial judgment and ability to distinguish between technology that is interesting and technology that creates meaningful business value.

Nice to Have

• Experience in real estate, PropTech, or adjacent industries.
• Experience with lease abstraction or document intelligence.
• Experience building or improving deal underwriting / financial analysis workflows.
• Experience with CRM automation, lead scoring, or sales intelligence.
• Previous experience establishing an AI/automation function from scratch.
• Experience working with legacy systems and fragmented business data.

What This Role Is Not

• Not a traditional SaaS Product Manager role — there is no external customer roadmap to own.
• Not a pure software engineering role — the mandate extends well beyond coding into business-process transformation and stakeholder adoption.
• Not a strategy-only AI leadership role — we need someone who can build, ship, implement, and measure outcomes.

What Success Looks Like

In this role, success will mean moving beyond AI experimentation to measurable operational impact.

You will be expected to identify high-value opportunities, build and deploy solutions quickly, get business teams to adopt them, and demonstrate tangible improvements in areas such as:

• Process turnaround time
• Manual effort
• Operating costs
• Data quality
• Decision-making speed
• Employee productivity
• Revenue or conversion efficiency

Over time, you will also have the opportunity to build the AI & automation capability itself, including the team, technology stack, processes, and governance.

Interview Process

Candidates should expect to:

1. Walk through an AI/automation program they personally owned end-to-end.
2. Explain the business problem, their approach, what they built, what went wrong, and how they fixed it.
3. Quantify the business impact and cost of implementation wherever possible.
4. Demonstrate their ability to build or explain a working AI/automation prototype as part of the evaluation process.

If you're someone who enjoys getting into messy real-world processes, building practical AI solutions, and seeing them actually get used — this role offers the opportunity to build an AI/automation function from the ground up.