The Practice Director is a senior, strategic, and highly execution-oriented techno-functional leader responsible for the growth, performance, and evolution of a Professional Services practice.
This role requires a leader who can operate confidently at both the strategic and operational levels—setting the direction for the practice while remaining close enough to the technology, product, customer, and delivery landscape to make sound decisions and unblock complex engagements.
The Practice Director will own practice strategy, portfolio performance, delivery excellence, customer outcomes, talent development, and the evolution of scalable service offerings. They will play a critical role in translating Workforce AI capabilities, customer needs, and business priorities into practical, differentiated, and scalable services.
A key expectation of this role is the ability to lead in an evolving AI landscape. The successful candidate must bring demonstrated experience in Workforce AI and practical AI capabilities, with a strong understanding of how AI can transform workforce processes, customer outcomes, and Professional Services delivery.
Working closely with Professional Services, Sales, Customer Success, Product, Engineering, Alliances, and Support, the Practice Director will shape strategy, influence product and services direction, resolve critical customer and delivery challenges, and build a high-performing organization capable of executing at scale.
Define and execute the practice strategy, operating model, governance, and service portfolio in alignment with business priorities and market opportunities.
Translate Workforce AI capabilities and evolving customer needs into scalable service offerings, implementation approaches, and advisory services.
Drive the evolution of the practice through new offerings, improved delivery models, differentiated capabilities, and strategic investments.
Partner with Sales and Customer Success to shape strategic opportunities, strengthen value propositions, and support practice growth.
Own the overall health and performance of the portfolio, including revenue, margin, utilization, delivery quality, customer satisfaction, risk, and strategic commitments.
Establish strong operating rhythms and governance to identify risks early and drive timely corrective action.
Provide senior leadership and direction for complex, high-risk, or strategically important customer engagements.
Ensure delivery teams maintain a strong focus on customer outcomes, time to value, quality, and sustainable adoption.
Serve as a senior techno-functional authority for complex customer engagements, connecting business objectives with product capabilities, solution design, integrations, implementation complexity, and delivery strategy.
Provide strategic guidance during complex pursuits, helping shape solution approaches, estimates, assumptions, risks, and customer outcomes.
Build trusted relationships with senior customer stakeholders and serve as an executive escalation point when required.
Lead critical customer and delivery escalations with urgency, sound judgment, and clear accountability through resolution.
Cross-Functional Leadership
Partner closely with Product and Engineering to provide market and customer insights, influence priorities, and address product or capability gaps affecting customer outcomes.
Work across Sales, Customer Success, Support, Alliances, and regional Services leadership to ensure strong alignment from opportunity through delivery and value realization.
Drive clear ownership and accountability across complex cross-functional dependencies.
Build and lead a high-performing organization of Practice Managers, architects, consultants, and delivery leaders.
Set a high bar for leadership, accountability, technical depth, execution, and customer ownership.
Develop future leaders through coaching, mentoring, succession planning, and targeted capability development.
Create an environment that combines strategic thinking, operational discipline, innovation, and strong execution.
Bring practical experience and thought leadership in Workforce AI and AI-enabled workforce transformation.
Shape how AI capabilities are positioned, implemented, adopted, and operationalized for customers.
Drive the responsible adoption of AI across Professional Services, including use cases that improve productivity, delivery quality, insights, risk visibility, and decision-making.
Establish practical AI-enabled ways of working while ensuring appropriate governance, human oversight, quality controls, security, and responsible use.
10–15+ years of progressive experience in Professional Services, consulting, SaaS, enterprise technology, or digital transformation, including significant leadership responsibility.
Demonstrated experience in Workforce AI, AI-enabled workforce transformation, or enterprise AI solutions is required.
Strong understanding of how AI can be applied to workforce strategy, skills, talent, learning, mobility, productivity, and organizational transformation.
Strong techno-functional depth, with the ability to move comfortably between business strategy, product capabilities, solution architecture, integrations, implementation complexity, and delivery execution.
A proven ability to set strategy and personally drive execution—translating broad business priorities into clear plans, decisions, operating mechanisms, and measurable results.
Demonstrated success leading a Professional Services practice, portfolio, business unit, or large delivery organization.
Proven ownership of business and portfolio performance, including revenue, margin, utilization, productivity, delivery quality, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement.
Experience shaping and scaling service offerings, delivery methodologies, governance models, and repeatable implementation approaches.
Strong executive presence with the ability to influence customers and senior stakeholders and navigate complex, high-stakes situations.
Proven experience leading complex customer escalations and making timely decisions in ambiguous environments.
A strong track record of building, developing, and retaining high-performing teams across geographically distributed and matrixed organizations.
Experience influencing and partnering effectively with Product, Engineering, Sales, Customer Success, and other senior cross-functional leaders.
Demonstrated experience applying AI to Professional Services delivery, with practical use cases across discovery, solution design, implementation, documentation, testing, knowledge management, reporting, and delivery insights.
Strong understanding of responsible AI practices, including human oversight, quality controls, data security, governance, and adoption.
The successful candidate will be:
Strategic, but highly execution-oriented
Technically credible and commercially minded
Comfortable moving between executive conversations and delivery-level detail
Decisive and able to bring clarity to ambiguity
A strong people leader who sets a high bar and holds teams accountable
Customer-focused, with strong ownership and a bias for action
Comfortable challenging the status quo and driving change
Passionate about Workforce AI and the practical application of AI to customer and business outcomes
Experience in HR technology, talent management, learning, skills intelligence, workforce transformation, or enterprise HCM solutions.
Experience delivering or consulting on AI-powered workforce, talent, skills, learning, or employee experience solutions.
Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Business, or a related discipline.
Relevant certifications in AI, cloud, enterprise architecture, project/program management, Agile, or Professional Services.
Experience with CRM, Professional Services Automation, resource management, project management, and portfolio management platforms.
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At Cornerstone, we believe in AI that works in the service of people, amplifying their judgment to drive high-performing, future-ready organizations forward. Cornerstone Workforce AI™, the intelligence platform for workforce readiness, brings together workforce and labor market data into a proprietary Cornerstone People Graph™, translating signals into intelligence, targeting learning where it matters, developing critical skills, and surfacing hidden talent. Delivered as an open, enterprise platform across whatever application your people work in every day, Cornerstone Workforce AI is built for scale, security, and trust, with certified AI guardrails. As an industry leader, Cornerstone is helping approximately 7,000 organizations, 140M+ users, across 186 countries build continuous workforce readiness.
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