Head of AI & Innovation

JOIN OUR JOURNEY

Medialab is the UK’s leading independent media agency, and one of the fastest growing in the industry. We’re a media agency that’s made differently: purpose-led, data-driven, founder-run and proudly independent.

Our entrepreneurial spirit means success is recognised and rewarded. There are no limits to what you can achieve here, which our employees agree with, evidenced by being a Campaign Best Place to Work for six consecutive years and one of The Sunday Times Best Places to Work 2025. As well as this, we’re Campaign’s Independent Agency of the Year 2024 and Media Week’s Independent Agency of the Year 2025.

We are IPA Effectiveness accredited, an IPA People-First agency, and All In Champions, with industry-leading work recognised by double-gold at the 2024 IPA Effectiveness Awards for our work with Laithwaites and a 2025 Effie for our work with Alzheimer’s Society.

Our independence means we can focus 100% on doing the right thing to secure success for our clients and our brilliant people. We work with a wide variety of clients including Hovis, IG, Sharps Bedrooms, SunLife, Standard Life, Ancestry, Laithwaites Wine, Save the Children, Guide Dogs, Alzheimer’s Society, RNLI and Clearscore.

OUR VALUES

• Commit to Doing the Right Thing (Act with integrity and accountability)

• Help People Flourish (Invest in people)

• Dig Deeper to Understand Better (Data driven curiosity)

OUR COMMITMENT TO YOU

Working at Medialab comes with lots of perks including all the usual things you would expect, such as a competitive salary package, pension, season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, weekly social events and big summer / end of year parties.
On top of that, we offer extra benefits, which make life at Medialab even more rewarding:

• Time to Unwind – 25 days holiday (+ Christmas holiday closure), a day off for your birthday, holiday buying scheme, flexi-hours and work abroad scheme.

• Hybrid Working – Balance between home and office. (3 days in office) We welcome requests for flexible working arrangements from the commencement of employment.

• Career Growth – A meritocratic approach to progression with quarterly reviews, CPD Platinum accredited training, mentoring and leadership support.

• Health & Wellbeing – Private medical insurance, health cash plan, gym discounts, wellbeing apps Mental Health First Aiders and free professional counselling.

• Supporting Families – Enhanced parental leave pay, flexible working and life assurance.

• Giving Back – Paid charity days and sustainability initiatives.

• Perks & Rewards – Retail discounts, long-service trips and an unforgettable team culture.

YOUR NEXT CHALLENGE

The Head of AI & Innovation is an AI Product Owner who is responsible for maintaining a prioritised, value-annotated backlog, ensuring the delivery of the innovation team meets the need and ensuring the value is materialised through seeing the solutions through to successful embed & enablement in the business.

This role sits at the intersection of strategy, operations and delivery. You’ll help identify where AI (and broader automation or tooling) can drive efficiency and smarter ways of working, and you’ll lead the internal AI innovation pipeline that brings those solutions to life.

You'll manage use case prioritisation and delivery from our Data Innovation Team which sits within the Apollo Department, spanning both in-house AI solutions and the development of our Marketing Effectiveness tooling. You’ll own strategic relationships with innovation partners like Google and third party AI consultancies. You’ll also act as the bridge between business challenges and technical delivery teams, ensuring that ideas become reality.

HOW YOU WILL MAKE AN IMPACT

• You will be accountable for the creation and management of a value-annotated innovation backlog, ensuring every item has a clear path to ROI.

• You will be responsible for defining user stories and functional requirements that translate business needs into actionable engineering tasks.

• Consult with the Lead AI & Innovation Engineer to ensure the technical roadmap aligns with the commercial priorities of the business.

• Design and run training sessions, creating documentation, and leading user enablement initiatives.

• Support department leads in restructuring workflows to accommodate new AI capabilities.

• Manage strategic relationships with external partners (e.g., Google, AI consultancies) and staying ahead of industry shifts.

• Act as the "face of AI" within the agency (~80/20 delivery/advocacy split), curating and sharing relevant industry news and trends.

• Provides enough technical context to hold high-level design discussions with engineers while deferring to their expertise on architecture.

• Line Manage the team, providing career mentorship and ensuring individual work aligns with the broader business strategy as well as managing scheduling & capacity of work across the team.

WHAT YOU BRING TO THE TEAM

• At least 3–5 years leading a product backlog, writing functional user stories, and managing delivery cycles in an Agile environment.

• Direct experience shipping AI-powered tools or automated workflows (e.g., LLM integrations, RAG-based applications, or internal GPTs).

• Experience presenting to and influencing Board-level or Department-head stakeholders.

• A track record of measuring and proving the ROI of technical deployments (e.g., hours saved, revenue unlocked, or adoption % targets met).

Nice to Have Skills

• Ability to "play" with the tech (Prompt Engineering, No-code tools) to build Proof-of-Concepts.

• Formal experience or certification in organisational change or internal training/enablement.

• Specific familiarity with the Google Cloud / Vertex AI / Gemini ecosystem.

• Understanding of the campaign lifecycle, attribution, or media planning workflows.