Hiring Your First AI Champion: The Role Every Firm Needs

By June 2025, I'm seeing a pattern: the firms making real progress on AI aren't the ones with massive budgets or dedicated AI teams. They're the ones with one great person—an "AI champion"—who knows the tools, understands the business, and has permission to experiment.

That role is critical. Here's how to define it, who to hire, and where to place them organizationally.

What An AI Champion Actually Does

It's not a role you'll find in a standard organizational chart. It's part strategist, part practitioner, part evangelist:

Strategy and Planning

• Identify opportunities where AI can drive value (client work, operations, business development)
• Build the business case for AI initiatives
• Set governance policy (which tools, which data, which workflows)
• Plan rollout and adoption strategy

Implementation and Training

• Test tools and workflows (Claude, ChatGPT, research tools, automation platforms)
• Build templates and processes around AI (prompt templates, workflow diagrams, data handling procedures)
• Train and support the team
• Iterate based on what works

Evangelism and Culture

• Keep leadership engaged with opportunities and progress
• Build buy-in across the team (show wins, not hype)
• Monitor adoption and address resistance
• Connect tools and improvements to business outcomes

It's not a technical role, though it requires technical fluency. It's not a business role, though it requires business understanding. It's bridging the gap.

Who Should You Hire?

The right person has a specific profile:

Background (in order of importance)

1. Deep operational knowledge of your firm. Someone from inside who understands your workflows, your clients, your constraints, and your culture. This matters more than AI expertise.
2. Comfort with rapid change. AI tools are moving fast. You need someone who sees that as exciting, not threatening.
3. Some technical fluency. Not code-level, but comfortable with APIs, data structures, and how tools connect. Someone who can read documentation and troubleshoot.
4. Credibility in the firm. Someone your team trusts. If they're pushing new tools, people will listen because they respect them, not because of their title.
5. Communication skills. They'll be translating between AI concepts and business needs constantly.

What NOT to Hire

• A "data scientist" who's never worked in professional services. They'll optimize for the wrong things.
• An external hire with no firm knowledge. They'll miss context and cultural fit.
• Someone too enamored with the technology. You need pragmatism, not hype.
• A pure technologist without business judgment. AI adoption is a business decision.

Where to Place This Role (Organizationally)

I see three options, each with trade-offs:

Option 1: Under Operations

Report to the COO. Good if your priority is operational efficiency, automation, and back-office improvements.

Advantage: Clear accountability, direct connection to cost savings.

Disadvantage: May miss client-facing opportunities. Operational thinking can be too narrow.

Option 2: Under Strategy/Leadership

Report directly to the Managing Partner. Good if AI is core to your growth strategy.

Advantage: Highest visibility, ability to influence direction and resource allocation.

Disadvantage: Risk of being too removed from implementation. Can become overly strategic and disconnected from actual work.

Option 3: Under Delivery/Service Line

If your firm is organized by service lines, place the champion there initially. You can expand later.

Advantage: Direct impact on client work, credibility with practitioners.

Disadvantage: Can miss cross-firm opportunities. Limited scope if you only go deep in one service line.

My Recommendation

Start with Option 1 (Operations) or Option 2 (Strategy). Operations if your firm's constraint is efficiency. Strategy if your constraint is growth and client differentiation.

The exact placement matters less than: (1) Clear reporting line, (2) Air cover to experiment, and (3) Ability to access other parts of the firm easily.

Role Scope and Sizing

For a $10–$25M firm, this is 0.5–1.0 FTE to start. Don't make it a full-time role until you've proven the value.

Structure it as:

• 40% strategy and planning (identifying opportunities, building business cases, setting policy)
• 40% implementation (testing tools, building workflows, training, supporting adoption)
• 20% evangelism and reporting (keeping leadership informed, building team buy-in)

As the firm scales and AI becomes more embedded, this grows to a full team. But start with one great person.

What Success Looks Like

By month 6–12, you should see:

• 2–3 AI workflows in production use (not pilots, not experiments—actually being used)
• Team comfort with approved tools increasing (less "is this safe?" more "how do I apply this?")
• Measurable impact on key metrics (time savings, quality improvement, or revenue impact from new service offerings)
• Clear governance policy documented and being followed
• Champion is proposing next-generation opportunities, not defending the basics

The Biggest Mistake

Most firms make one critical error: they hire someone to be "the AI person" without giving them the scope, budget, or authority to actually drive change.

If you're hiring a champion, you're betting on their judgment. Give them runway to be right and wrong. The best champions I've seen had permission to fail safely and learn quickly.

Final Thought

The AI champion isn't a luxury—by mid-2025, it's infrastructure. Every professional services firm that's going to compete effectively needs someone whose job is to translate AI opportunities into business advantage.

If you don't have this role yet, this is the quarter to create it.