Associate Partner, Data and AI, Utilities

Introduction

A career in IBM Consulting is built on long-term client relationships and close collaboration worldwide. You'll work with leading companies across industries, helping them shape their hybrid cloud and AI journeys. With support from our strategic partners, robust IBM technology, and Red Hat, you'll have the tools to drive meaningful change and accelerate client impact. At IBM Consulting, curiosity fuels success. You'll be encouraged to challenge the norm, explore new ideas, and create innovative solutions that deliver real results. Our culture of growth and empathy focuses on your long-term career development while valuing your unique skills and experiences.

Your role and responsibilities

IBM Consulting is looking for an Associate Partner to own growth for Data & Analytics across our Industrial and Communications clients. You will be accountable for a defined portfolio of client relationships, pipeline, and revenue [insert target, e.g., annual bookings or book of business], and you will be measured on the outcomes those clients achieve.

You will sit with CIOs, CDOs, and business executives to define where their data estates should go and why. Many of our clients are still running on legacy platforms that limit what they can do with their data. You will lead the case for, and the delivery of, migrations to hybrid cloud architectures built on Red Hat and IBM’s data and AI portfolio, including watsonx, so that modernization becomes the foundation for GenAI and agentic AI rather than a separate project.

You bring a record of selling and delivering multi-year transformation programs, a working understanding of how Industrial and Communications companies compete, and the ability to show a client the financial case for a program before it starts. You will also take responsibility for the team that delivers it, and for building a reputation that wins the next engagement.

This role suits a leader who can hold both the commercial conversation and the technical one, and who wants to build a practice at scale rather than manage a single account.

Key Responsibilities:

Market Leadership & Growth

• Expand IBM’s Data & Analytics presence by identifying new market opportunities, developing differentiated solutions, and building a strong pipeline.

• Engage senior client executives to understand strategic priorities and shape data transformation roadmaps aligned to their business and financial goals.

• Lead end-to-end sales cycles, including solution definition, proposal leadership, financial structuring, and contract negotiation.

Strategic Advisory & Transformation Delivery

• Advise C-suite leaders on strategies to their data estate modernization, advanced analytics, GenAI, and agentic AI to drive business performance.

• Architect integrated solutions that include:

• Migration from legacy data platforms to modern cloud-based architectures

• Data engineering and Information governance

• Business intelligence and advanced analytics

• GenAI-powered and agentic AI-driven automation and decisioning

• Lead complex transformation programs from discovery through delivery, ensuring measurable outcomes and client satisfaction.

Engagement Excellence & Financial Stewardship

• Oversee multi-disciplinary delivery teams to ensure high-quality, consistent execution across all program phases.

• Manage engagement financials, including forecasting, margin performance, and overall portfolio profitability.

• Align right client technologies, industry expertise, and global delivery capabilities to maximize client value.

Practice Building & Talent Development

• Recruit, mentor, and grow top-tier consultants, architects, and data specialists.

• Build and scale capabilities in data modernization, cloud data engineering, analytics, GenAI, and emerging agentic AI techniques.

• Contribute to practice strategy, offering development, and capability growth across the global Data & Analytics team.

Thought Leadership & Market Presence

• Stay ahead of sector and technology trends, including cloud modernization, GenAI, agentic system design, regulatory changes, and evolving competitive dynamics.

• Represent IBM at industry conferences, client events, webinars, and executive roundtables.

• Create original thought leadership—articles, perspectives, point-of-views—that positions IBM as a leading advisor in data and AI-driven transformation.

This job can be performed from anywhere in the US.

Required technical and professional expertise

• Experience in consulting, data strategy, analytics, or digital transformation, with exposure to Industrial or Communications clients.

• Hands-on work modernizing data ecosystems, moving workloads from legacy on-premise platforms to cloud-native or hybrid architectures.

• Implementation experience with one or more major cloud data and AI platforms (AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud), and familiarity with the others sufficient to compare architectures for a client’s constraints.

• Understanding of generative AI in production, including retrieval-augmented generation, vector databases, the role of data quality and governance in output quality, and when agentic patterns are appropriate.

• Awareness of the risks generative AI introduces, such as data exposure, unreliable outputs, unpredictable cost, and regulatory obligations, and experience designing controls for them.

• Experience selling, structuring, and delivering large data and AI transformation programs, including the financial case for each.

• Working knowledge of data engineering, governance, and analytics, and of how they connect to AI and machine learning workloads.

• Experience managing engagement economics, forecasting, and margin across a portfolio.

• Experience building and developing high-performing technical and consulting teams.

IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.