Operations Strategist

At U.S. Bank, we’re on a journey to do our best. Helping the customers and businesses we serve to make better and smarter financial decisions, enabling the communities we support to grow and succeed in the right ways, all more confidently and more often—that’s what we call the courage to thrive.   We believe it takes all of us to bring our shared ambition to life, and each person is unique in their potential. A career with U.S. Bank gives you a wide, ever-growing range of opportunities to discover what makes you thrive. Try new things, learn new skills and discover what you excel at—all from Day One.   As a wholly owned subsidiary of U.S. Bank, Elavon is committed to building the platforms and ecosystems that help over 1.5 million customers around the world to achieve their financial goals—no matter what they need. From transaction processing to customer service, to driving innovation and launching new products, we’re building a range of tailored payment solutions powered by the latest technology. As part of our team, you can explore what motivates and energizes your career goals: partnering with our customers, our communities, and each other.   We actively uphold transparent and fair hiring practices that support individual opportunity, inclusive culture, and career mobility across all levels of our organisation. We offer meaningful opportunities for growth, a culture of inclusion, and a strong commitment to transparency and integrity in everything we do. Job Description About the Role  The Operations AI Strategist will own the business strategy for applying AI and agentic decisioning across PMI Operations in Europe and North America. The remit spans merchant servicing and onboarding, disputes, AI-enabled digital self-service, client growth and retention, and transaction operations.  This is a business strategy and operating-model leadership role, not an AI development role. The role holder will:  • Set the AI agenda and portfolio priorities for PMI Operations, linking investment decisions to customer, commercial, operational, workforce, risk, and control outcomes.  • Define where AI should assist, recommend, process, or decide, including the level of autonomy and human oversight.  • Establish the framework for safely progressing from AI-assisted to human-supervised and, where appropriate, AI-led operations.  • Represent the PMI Operations AI agenda in enterprise and business-line governance forums.  • Define how people and AI work together, including the capabilities, roles, and adoption measures required for a blended workforce.  Key Responsibilities  • Own the AI and agentic decisioning strategy across PMI Operations, translating business priorities into a portfolio spanning merchant servicing and onboarding, disputes, digital self-service, client growth and retention, and transaction operations.  • Define the AI autonomy framework, including autonomy levels, confidence thresholds, approval and override rules, escalation paths, exception handling, and progression from human-led to AI-led processing.  • Turn operational judgment into decisioning logic, using quality findings, escalations, fallbacks, and exception patterns to refine decision rules, workflows, and the AI roadmap.  • Shape the AI-enabled digital self-service strategy, improving intent capture, IVR containment, deflection, and routing while protecting customer experience, retention, and commercial outcomes.  • Own the AI portfolio and value realization framework, defining success measures, tracking impact across revenue, retention, leakage, cost-to-serve, quality, cycle time, straight-through processing, and automation coverage, driving reuse across regions, and recommending where solutions should scale, evolve, pause, or stop.  • Benchmark AI agains