Head of Artificial Intelligence

AI Director / Head of AI – PE Backed Financial Services Business

Immediate Start - London

£800 – £1200 a day

Dartmouth Partners are supporting a PE backed financial services business on a search for an AI Director / Head of AI to help shape and build their AI capability from the ground up.

Reporting directly to the CAIO, this hire will play a critical role in defining how AI is deployed across the organisation, moving beyond experimentation into real, production‐grade use cases tied to value creation.

This is a hybrid strategy + build role, requiring both technical depth and commercial judgement. It will suit someone comfortable operating without structure, where both the roadmap and operating model are still being defined.

You must have:

✅ Experience taking AI use cases from POC into production (not purely advisory)

✅ Strong understanding of modern AI stacks (LLMs, agents, orchestration, data layers)

✅ Ability to make build vs buy decisions across AI tooling and platforms

✅ Experience operating in ambiguous, early-stage environments where capability is being built from scratch

What you'll be doing:

💡 Define and shape the AI stack and architecture

💡 Identify where business processes can be genuinely automated or agentified, vs where human oversight remains critical

💡 Move early AI initiatives from proof of concept into scalable production deployments

💡 Contribute to a 3–5 year AI and data roadmap, aligned to PE value creation objectives

💡 Act as a thought partner to senior leadership, while remaining close enough to execution to ensure delivery is real, not theoretical

Start: ASAP

Location: London (hybrid, flexible)

Duration: 6 months initially, with a view to extend/go permanent