AI Solutions Consulting Lead at Crowe in Chicago, IL

Your Journey at Crowe Starts Here:

At Crowe, you can build a meaningful and rewarding career. With real flexibility to balance work with life moments, you’re trusted to deliver results and make an impact. We embrace you for who you are, care for your well-being, and nurture your career. Everyone has equitable access to opportunities for career growth and leadership. Over our 80-year history, delivering excellent service through innovation has been a core part of our DNA across our audit, tax, and consulting groups. That’s why we continuously invest in innovative ideas, such as AI-enabled insights and technology-powered solutions, to enhance our services. Join us at Crowe and embark on a career where you can help shape the future of our industry.

Job Description:

AI Solutions Consulting Lead

About Crowe Studio

Crowe Studio is a business unit dedicated to helping clients scale smarter, transform faster, and lead in a platform-driven economy. Built for speed and flexibility, Crowe Studio operates outside the constraints of traditional professional services delivery models, giving clients access to cross-disciplinary innovation, embedded AI capabilities, and global delivery resources—all in service of solving complex business challenges in faster, smarter ways.

Through Crowe Studio, the firm provides clients with an innovation partner focused on rapid execution, deep technology integration, and high-impact results. We're building the next generation of business models for professional services, where human expertise and AI are embedded within clients' operations to drive ongoing impact, not just deliver isolated projects.

As a member of Crowe Studio, you will help distinguish Crowe in the market and drive the firm's technology and innovation strategy. The future is powered by AI—come build it with us.

About Forward Deployed Engineering

The Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) Practice partners with organizations to accelerate AI-driven transformation through embedded consulting, hands-on solution delivery, and strategic capability building. Our consultants work directly alongside client teams to close the gap between AI potential and real-world business outcomes—guiding adoption strategies, leading delivery initiatives, and building the organizational capacity for sustained transformation.

Unlike traditional advisory models, FDE consultants bring both technical depth and consulting rigor, enabling clients to design, prototype, and deploy AI solutions at speed. We emphasize outcome ownership, ensuring that every engagement delivers measurable impact—not just recommendations.

Our consultants combine business analysis, AI fluency, and client-facing communication to help companies identify the right use cases, build the right solutions, and demonstrate measurable impact. We specialize in making AI accessible—turning complex technology into concrete business value for clients across industries.

Our engagements range from focused AI readiness workshops that define a clear transformation roadmap, to extended delivery partnerships where our consultants lead AI initiatives alongside client teams through to adoption and value realization.

About the Team

We invest in expertise. You'll have the time, space, and support to go deep on client engagements and build lasting technical and strategic mastery. You'll work with cross-functional teams and client teams as a trusted advisor and domain expert.

We believe in continuous growth. Our team is committed to professional development and knowledge-sharing.

We protect balance. Our distributed team culture is grounded in trust and flexibility. We offer unlimited PTO, a flexible remote work policy, and a supportive environment that prioritizes sustainable, long-term performance.

About the Role

Role Overview

The AI Consulting Lead within the Forward Deployed Engineering practice owns complete AI transformation projects end-to-end, with full accountability for scope, timeline, budget, and deliverable quality. Operating on the Lead Track, the AI Consulting Lead serves as the primary client relationship owner, manages a team of direct reports, and proactively drives business development opportunities in coordination with the sales team. This role requires strong executive presence, strategic decision-making, and the ability to lead complex engagements in ambiguous, rapidly evolving environments.

In this role, you will:

• Own complete AI transformation projects end-to-end with full accountability for scope definition, timeline management, resource coordination, budget oversight, and deliverable quality
• Manage direct reports through formal performance management, career development planning, and team capability building
• Serve as primary client relationship owner, managing C-suite and stakeholder interactions, building trusted strategic partnerships, and ensuring long-term account alignment
• Drive solution development through use case identification, prioritization, validation, data exploration, experimentation design, and Proof of Concept delivery
• Proactively drive business development activities including opportunity qualification, strategic proposals, client presentations, and opportunity sizing with the sales team
• Oversee practice improvement initiatives, contributing methodology enhancements and process improvements with measurable impact on team effectiveness
• Facilitate client workshops, training sessions, and capability building activities to ensure sustainable AI adoption
• Manage project risks, issues, and changes proactively while maintaining clear stakeholder communication and escalating appropriately
• Provide formal coaching to team members through structured 1:1s, development planning, and performance feedback
• Demonstrate initiative and full project ownership in ambiguous, rapidly changing situations

Qualifications

• 4+ years in a consulting, AI delivery, or technology leadership role, with demonstrated experience in project ownership and managing direct reports
• Proven ability to own complete AI transformation projects end-to-end, with full accountability for scope, timeline, budget, and deliverable quality across engagements of varying complexity
• Experience managing direct reports through formal performance management, career development planning, and team capability building, with documented development outcomes
• Strong track record as primary client relationship owner, managing C-suite and executive stakeholder interactions and building trusted long-term strategic partnerships
• Deep expertise in AI solution delivery across multiple technology stacks, including Microsoft Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, AI Builder, Copilot) and emerging automation tools such as n8n, Make, Zapier, and Replit Agent
• Demonstrated ability to proactively drive business development, including opportunity qualification, strategic proposal development, and coordination with sales teams to advance pipeline
• Advanced understanding of coding concepts, APIs, databases, natural language processing, Azure AI services, and prompt engineering, with experience overseeing low-code/no-code solution delivery at project scale
• Background overseeing delivery of intelligent automation solutions including AI agents with reasoning and planning capabilities, agent orchestration, intelligent document processing, and conversational AI experiences
• History of guiding teams in strategic platform selection across Power Platform, n8n, Make, Zapier, and other emerging low-code platforms based on use case requirements and integration needs
• Track record staying current with the rapidly evolving AI landscape and enabling team adoption of new and emerging tools and platforms
• Skilled in proactive problem-solving and adaptive leadership in ambiguous situations, with a track record of full project ownership and delivery in unstructured environments
• Relevant bachelor’s degree in business, engineering, computer science, information systems, data analytics, or a related field, or equivalent professional or academic experience
• Travel for this role may be up to 80%, based on client and project needs. Actual travel requirements may vary

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience owning client engagements with increasing scope and complexity, including direct accountability for client satisfaction and engagement renewal
• Demonstrated track record developing direct reports, with documented coaching outcomes and career progression among team members
• Background driving business development independently, including strategic account planning and active coordination with sales teams on complex opportunities
• Experience overseeing practice improvement or methodology development initiatives with measurable, documented impact
• Adept at facilitating executive-level client workshops and capability building sessions that drive sustained AI adoption

Minimum Knowledge Expectations

All candidates for Crowe Studio positions are expected to demonstrate baseline AI and technical knowledge, regardless of role or level.

Core Knowledge Areas

All Crowe Studio team members are expected to have working knowledge in the following areas:

• Basic ML/AI literacy (training vs inference, knowledge cutoffs, LLM fundamentals)
• Prompt engineering and instruction hierarchies
• Context window and context management
• Model selection and capabilities
• Fine-tuning vs prompting vs RAG
• Hallucination and grounding strategies
• Guardrails and output validation
• Evals and testing approaches
• Security and PII awareness
• Responsible AI and governance
• LLM APIs and integration standards
• RAG and vector search
• Vector databases and embeddings
• Agentic workflows and tool use
• Cost and performance awareness
• Common enterprise use cases

What We Look For

Beyond technical knowledge, we look for candidates who demonstrate:

• Intellectual curiosity – asking thoughtful questions and seeking deeper understanding
• Attention to detail – noticing subtle issues and inconsistencies
• Analytical thinking – breaking down complex problems and thinking critically
• Tenacity – following issues through to resolution, even when challenging
• Strong communication – conveying ideas clearly to technical and non-technical audiences

We expect the candidate to uphold Crowe’s values of Care, Trust, Courage, and Stewardship. These values define who we are. We expect all of our people to act ethically and with integrity at all times.

In compliance with federal law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work in the United States and to complete the required employment eligibility verification form upon hire. Crowe is not sponsoring for work authorization at this time.

The wage range for this role takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs. The disclosed range estimate has not been adjusted for the applicable geographic differential associated with the location at which the position may be filled. At Crowe, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is $102,400.00 - $204,100.00 per year.

Our Benefits: Your exceptional people experience starts here. At Crowe, we know that great people are what makes a great firm. We care about our people and offer employees a comprehensive total rewards package. Learn more about what working at Crowe can mean for you!

How You Can Grow: We will nurture your talent in an inclusive culture that values diversity. You will have the chance to meet on a consistent basis with your Career Coach that will guide you in your career goals and aspirations. Learn more about where talent can prosper!

More about Crowe: Crowe (www.crowe.com) is one of the largest public accounting, consulting and technology firms in the United States. Crowe uses its deep industry expertise to provide audit services to public and private entities while also helping clients reach their goals with tax, advisory, risk and performance services. Crowe is recognized by many organizations as one of the country's best places to work. Crowe serves clients worldwide as an independent member of Crowe Global, one of the largest global accounting networks in the world. The network consists of more than 200 independent accounting and advisory services firms in more than 130 countries around the world.

Crowe LLP provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetics, national origin, disability or protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

Crowe LLP does not accept unsolicited candidates, referrals or resumes from any staffing agency, recruiting service, sourcing entity or any other third-party paid service at any time. Any referrals, resumes or candidates submitted to Crowe, or any employee or owner of Crowe without a pre-existing agreement signed by both parties covering the submission will be considered the property of Crowe, and free of charge.

Crowe will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws.

Please visit our webpage to see notices of the various state and local Ban-the-Box laws and Fair Chance Ordinances, where applicable.

We are committed to a merit-based hiring process, evaluating all candidates consistently using objective, job-related criteria such as relevant experience, demonstrated skills, measurable impact, and alignment with the role’s responsibilities, and making employment decisions in a fair and inclusive manner free from discrimination.

If you are interested in applying for employment with Crowe and are in need of an accommodation or require special assistance to navigate our website or to complete your application, please visit our Applicant Assistance and Accommodations page for more information: https://careers.crowe.com/crowe-applicant-assistance-and-accommodation