Senior manager ai & automation enablement

Purpose & Overall Relevance for the Organization:

At adidas, we have a very clear mission: “to be the best sports brand in the world”; and a very passionate purpose: “Through sport, we have the power to change lives.” These guiding principles shape how we operate as a company, how we collaborate with our partners, how we create our products, and how we connect with our consumers. Our values represent essential behaviors, reflecting a winning mindset we strive to see in every team member.

The Senior Manager AI & Automation Enablement leads the automation and AI-enabled transformation agenda for the adidas Latin America Digital Team, enabling new and scalable ways of working, stronger governance, and faster execution across the regional Digital organization. The role acts as a center of excellence for Digital Commerce Automation, providing strategic guidance, governance coordination, consultancy, training, process reengineering, and execution support to identify, prioritize, design, and deploy automation solutions that improve productivity, quality, speed, scalability, and decision-making.

The role requires business acumen, technical fluency, project leadership, and change management to translate business opportunities into clear automation use cases, simplify complex processes, and ensure initiatives are scalable, responsible, well documented, and adopted by the organization.

Key Responsibilities:

Business Process Identification & Prioritization (the “What”)

• Define and manage the Digital Commerce Automation roadmap for Latin America, prioritizing initiatives based on business value, feasibility, scalability, and strategic alignment.
• Lead process discovery and reengineering across Digital Commerce, identifying inefficiencies, manual work, bottlenecks, and automation opportunities.
• Facilitate workshops with business, operations, analytics, and technical stakeholders to map current-state processes and design future-state ways of working.
• Coordinate with adidas global AI governance to ensure LAM automation and AI initiatives are responsible, secure, auditable, and aligned with global standards.

Solution Design (the “Which”)

• Translate business needs into clear technical briefs for developers, engineers, analysts, global teams, and external partners.
• Evaluate and select automation and AI tools and platforms based on business fit, cost, scalability, and ease of integration, maintaining a high-level working knowledge of the underlying technology (cloud platforms, APIs, workflow automation) sufficient to translate between business and technical teams, not to build the solutions.
• Coordinate the design, development, testing, deployment, and continuous improvement of AI-enabled automations, tools, and digital solutions, ensuring solutions balance business impact, user experience, technical complexity, governance requirements, scalability, and speed to market.

Adoption & Change Management (the “How”)

• Translate complex workflows into simplified documentation, decision flows, roles, responsibilities, and success metrics to enable adoption and scalability.
• Drive change management and adoption across Digital teams through training, communication, and hands-on support so automation and AI solutions are used, not only deployed.
• Convert ideas into structured execution plans with clear scope, owners, timelines, milestones, dependencies, risks, KPIs, and decision points; lead cross-functional execution to ensure initiatives are delivered on time and in full.
• Communicate concepts, plans, progress, risks, and impact in a clear and simplified way for different audiences, from senior leaders to operational users and technical teams.

Key Relationships:

• Digital / eCommerce leadership and regional market teams
• Technology, data, analytics, developers, engineers, and global/legal AI governance teams
• Operations, finance, supply chain, and business process owners
• External vendors and automation partners
• End users and cross-functional teams adopting automation and AI-enabled ways of working

Knowledge, Skills and leadership abilities:

• Experience in digital transformation, automation, AI use cases, process reengineering, technology consulting, data, digital commerce operations, or related fields.
• Practical understanding of AI automation, workflow automation, cloud platforms, APIs, data integration, dashboards, and system connectivity.
• High-level, working knowledge of automation and AI concepts — cloud platforms, APIs, workflow automation, data integration — sufficient to translate business needs into technical requirements and evaluate solutions and vendors; deep hands-on engineering expertise is not required for this role.
• Strong ability to translate business problems into technical requirements, and technical complexity into simple business language.
• Proven project management capability, including roadmap planning, stakeholder alignment, prioritization, risk management, timeline ownership, and execution follow-up.
• Strong presentation and storytelling skills, with ability to simplify complex concepts for senior leaders, technical partners, and operational users.
• Curious, structured, hands-on, and comfortable working in a fast-moving, cross-functional regional environment.

Leadership expectation: This role is expected to connect strategic priorities with execution, influence cross-functional teams, manage complex initiatives, and enable scalable automation and AI solutions that strengthen productivity, decision-making, and business performance across adidas Latin America. In line with the adidas leadership framework (Excel, Empower & Elevate), the role drives business excellence, fosters innovation, empowers teams, promotes accountability, and delivers sustainable impact through collaboration and continuous growth.

Requisite Education and Experience / Minimum Qualifications:

• University degree in Business Administration, Engineering, Digital, Data, Technology, Analytics, or related fields.
• Relevant experience in digital transformation, automation, AI use cases, process reengineering, technology consulting, data, digital commerce operations, or related fields.
• Advanced English required to collaborate with global stakeholders; Spanish and/or Portuguese is a plus.