Agentic AI Solutions, Associate Director

Key Responsibilities

AI Solutions Engineering & Practical Tool Delivery

• Partner with ESCO sourcing operations leads and category managers to identify, prioritize, and scope high-value opportunities where agentic AI, machine learning, and automation can improve speed, productivity, insight generation, and decision quality across the CDMO/CMO network.
• Translate stakeholder needs into practical AI tools, technical designs, acceptance criteria, and delivery plans that fit real sourcing, supplier-management, and technical-transfer workflows.
• Build and deploy AI-enabled applications, services, and workflows that integrate models, sourcing data sources, document collections, and user-facing interfaces for decision support and workflow automation.

Agentic Sourcing AI Systems & Knowledge Extraction

• Create reusable agent skills, task harnesses, validators, run ledgers, and reproducibility controls that allow AI agents to execute diverse, long-running sourcing tasks reliably (e.g., capacity assessment, RFx analysis, technical-transfer status tracking).
• Build agentic knowledge extraction and question-answering systems for structured and unstructured sourcing content, including CDMO proposals, quality/audit reports, contracts, capacity data, technical-transfer records, and supplier scorecards.
• Design evaluation, monitoring, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop escalation patterns so agentic outputs are auditable, traceable, and appropriate for high-consequence sourcing and supply-continuity decisions.
• Apply knowledge graphs, data ontologies, and structured knowledge representation where they improve retrieval, traceability, and reuse across the supplier and CDMO network.

Decision Support & Workflow Transformation

• Build the PRD Supply Chain Intelligence (AI) agent end to end — from feasibility through pilot to production — as a core deliverable of this role, in coordination with Tech@Lilly and PRD Strategy's End-to-End Supply Chain Design Process.
• Turn information from CDMO/CMO documents, sourcing systems, and business processes into faster insights, stronger judgment, and improved ways of working across ESCO.
• Communicate model outputs, evidence, assumptions, limitations, uncertainty, and recommended actions through clear visualizations and decision-support outputs that influence solution adoption and sourcing decisions.

Reliability, Validation, MLOps & Responsible AI

• Champion software engineering best practices including version control, automated testing, CI/CD, containers, documentation, reproducibility, observability, and fit-for-purpose MLOps/agent-ops practices.
• Develop validation, monitoring, documentation, and model-risk approaches aligned with intended use, responsible AI principles, GxP awareness, and regulatory expectations where applicable to sourcing and supply-chain decisions.
• Leverage cloud infrastructure to develop, test, deploy, and scale agentic workflows, document-intelligence systems, and analytics applications supporting ESCO.

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Scientific/Business Translation

• Partner across ESCO, PRD Strategy, Procurement, PRD functional leaders (Drug Substance, Drug Product, Analytical, Packaging), and Tech@Lilly to align agentic tools with enterprise data and platform standards, including the Portfolio Intelligence Hub and the CS&D Supply Chain Control Tower.
• Coordinate with Tech@Lilly's formal CRO data exchange and digital workflow for CMC lab experiments so ESCO's agentic tools adopt existing digital exchange pathways rather than creating parallel ones.
• Translate complex AI findings into clear narratives and business cases that influence solution adoption, workflow redesign, and sourcing-team priorities.

Capability Building, External Leadership & Mentorship

• Advance ESCO's technology roadmap for practical agentic AI tools, document intelligence, and reusable knowledge systems, drawing on DDCS's Digital Transformation and Data Science team as a cross-org reference and collaboration partner.
• Share methods, reference patterns, and lessons learned that help ESCO embed agentic AI into everyday sourcing work.
• Mentor team members and partners on reliable agentic systems, responsible AI, and rigorous communication of model assumptions, uncertainty, and decision impact.
• Stay current with the fast-moving agentic AI and LLM landscape and bring new tools, frameworks, and techniques into ESCO's practice where they add real value.

First-Year Outcomes

By month 6: First agentic AI pilot (e.g., CDMO capacity or technical-transfer status assistant) live with named users; document-intelligence extraction pipeline operating over a defined CDMO/CMO document set; PRD Supply Chain Intelligence agent feasibility assessment complete with a go/no-go recommendation. By month 12: PRD Supply Chain Intelligence agent in production pilot with defined evaluation criteria and monitoring in place; at least one additional agentic workflow adopted into standard ESCO sourcing operations; reusable agent skills and evaluation framework established for future ESCO AI use cases.