Strategy Lead, AI- CX & Retention

About Petfolk Petfolk is a veterinary care company founded by Dr. Audrey Wystrach. We run modern clinics, a 24/7 virtual care app, and a connected care model that pet parents actually love. Our NPS sits above 90. Newsweek put us in their top five Most Loved Workplaces globally. We’ve raised north of $116M from Deerfield Management, White Star Capital, Movendo Capital, and others.

**The Opportunity** We’re hiring an AI Strategy Lead to own the deployment, launch, and ongoing optimization of conversational AI across Petfolk’s virtual care business. This person will sit inside the Virtual Care and Customer Service function and report directly to the VP of Medical Strategy and Development.

By the time you start, the conversational AI platform will already be selected and in deployment. Your first job is to get deeply fluent in the platform’s tooling, functionality, and every protocol driving customer interactions across phone, SMS, email, and chat. From there, you’ll own the launch, monitor performance against real success criteria, and iterate relentlessly — refining workflows, guardrails, escalation paths, and prompts until the system is genuinely excellent.

Over time, this role expands. You’ll take on broader ownership of virtual care analytics — interaction data, staffing patterns, service levels, handle times — and use that analysis to identify where AI can create more value and where more traditional operational changes are the better lever. You’ll build business cases, model ROI, and partner with Engineering, Brand, Operations, and Medical to put improvements in place.

This is not a role for someone who wants to observe or advise. It’s for someone who looks at how things are currently working, figures out what’s slowing it down, and fixes it. You’ll own work end to end — from figuring out the problem to putting something in place and making sure it actually gets used.

Success in this role is simple: The virtual care team moves faster, customers get better service, and the AI systems you manage deliver measurable improvements in quality, efficiency, and scalability.

What You’ll Do

• Take full ownership of the conversational AI platform already in deployment — learn the tooling, functionality, and interaction protocols inside and out, then drive it through launch and beyond.
• Define and document use cases, success criteria, escalation rules, and guardrails for AI-enabled customer interactions across phone, SMS, email, and chat.
• Lead testing efforts in close partnership with operational, medical, engineering, brand, and vendor partners. Evaluate performance against defined quality, customer experience, and business success measures.
• Own the ongoing cycle of implementing, testing, evaluating, and iterating on AI-supported workflows. Refine prompts, logic, escalation paths, and guardrails to drive the best possible outcomes. Prioritized by business impact.
• Identify and prioritize additional use cases where AI can improve customer experience, quality, efficiency, or scalability — and sequence future deployments based on operational need, business value, and feasibility.
• Analyze customer interaction data, workflow trends, staffing patterns, service levels, and handle times to surface broader improvement opportunities across virtual care.
• Build business cases and economic analyses for both AI and non-AI initiatives, including expected impact on quality, customer satisfaction, efficiency, labor leverage, and return on investment.
• Establish reporting and review processes that provide clear visibility into performance across AI use cases. Define and monitor KPIs including adoption, containment, average handle time, CSAT, quality assurance scores, and implementation progress.
• Work cross-functionally with Engineering, Brand, Operations, Medical, and other stakeholders to drive alignment, establish clear ownership and timelines, and ensure accountability across initiatives.
• Over time, expand into broader ownership of virtual care analytics, workforce management modeling, and capacity planning to improve operational decision-making across the line of business.

Requirements **Must Have**

• AI-Native Builder. You don’t just use AI tools. You build systems with them. You’ve put together workflows, automated pipelines, or created AI-powered tools in a marketing or growth setting. You can show us what you’ve built and talk through why you made the choices …