EY Arena - Senior Immersive Experience Facilitator - Riyadh, KSA
EY · Riyadh
Senior Immersive Experience Facilitator
Full-time | Riyadh | EY Riyadh Innovation Hub
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The opportunity
EY’s Riyadh Innovation Hub brings senior leaders together with the people, methods and technology needed to work through complex challenges and determine what to do next. It combines EY wavespace methods with immersive environments, live technology demonstrations and rapid prototyping, delivered in collaboration with EY teams and technology alliance partners.
Connected to EY’s global network of innovation centers and wavespace locations, the hub hosts high-impact strategic conversations for government, energy, infrastructure and multinational clients. It places particular emphasis on intelligent enterprise, AI-enabled transformation and future-focused growth.
We are looking for a Senior Immersive Experience Facilitator to shape, curate and lead the hub’s most senior client experiences. This is a highly visible, client-facing role for an accomplished practitioner who can engage C-suite executives, board members and ministerial audiences in a technology-rich environment, while ensuring that technology supports the conversation and leads to meaningful business outcomes.
You will work closely with account, sector, service line and alliance teams to define the client challenge, design the experience journey and lead the engagement. You will also collaborate with the hub’s immersive design, technical and engineering teams to validate promising ideas through rapid prototypes.
The outputs of each experience should enable clear decisions, validated concepts and qualified commercial opportunities that can be transitioned to the relevant EY service lines for proof of concept and delivery.
The role reports to the Hub Director and requires a depth of executive engagement and immersive-environment experience beyond a traditional facilitation role.
Your key responsibilities
Executive facilitation in immersive environments
- Lead high-stakes sessions for C-suite executives, board members and ministerial audiences, including plenary discussions, structured activities, breakout conversations, synthesis and outcome development.
- Facilitate intensive, inquiry-led conversations that challenge assumptions, uncover the underlying issue and guide senior stakeholders toward informed decisions.
- Integrate immersive spaces, live demonstrations, simulations and data visualizations into the client conversation rather than using them simply as presentation elements.
- Create an inclusive and psychologically safe environment that encourages meaningful participation throughout the experience.
- Apply strong listening skills, emotional intelligence and executive presence to manage energy, ambiguity, conflict and politically sensitive viewpoints in real time.
- Guide stakeholders toward alignment while preserving the complexity of the challenge and ensuring that all relevant perspectives are considered.
Experience shaping and curation
- Shape each engagement before detailed design begins by aligning with account, sector and alliance leaders on the client problem, audience, intended decisions and measures of success.
- Design the end-to-end client journey across discovery, co-creation and transformation formats.
- Select the spaces, content, demonstrations, activities and prototypes that best support the client’s objectives.
- Brief the hub’s immersive designer, technical lead and engineering team on what should be developed, adapted or visualized.
- Direct external content or experience agencies when required.
- Lead sessions delivered alongside technology alliance partners while ensuring EY retains ownership of the agenda, narrative and client outcomes.
- Ensure that every activity has a clear purpose, intended outcome and connection to the overall client challenge.
Applied innovation and prototype direction
- Translate ambiguous challenges into clearly defined opportunity areas, hypotheses and use cases grounded in business value and human needs.
- Prioritize AI and technology use cases using criteria such as desirability, feasibility, viability, responsible AI and adoption readiness.
- Translate technical possibilities into executive-relevant narratives, choices and investment decisions for both business and technology audiences.
- Define what each prototype should prove, including its purpose, assumptions, success measures, guardrails and appropriate level of fidelity.
- Direct designers and engineers to ensure that prototypes remain connected to the client problem and intended user experience, without being required to act as the primary software engineer.
- Embed responsible AI, data privacy, security, governance and ethical considerations into concept and prototype decisions from the outset.
Commercial conversion and handover
- Produce clear outputs from each engagement, including a sharpened problem statement, prioritized use cases and a recommended prototype or proof-of-concept pathway.
- Prepare structured handover packs with clear recommendations, agreed success criteria, a proposed funding route and a named owner within the relevant EY service line.
- Connect experience outcomes to qualified client opportunities, proposals, pilots and follow-on work.
- Build trusted relationships with senior clients, ecosystem partners and technology providers.
- Work with account and service line teams to maintain momentum following each engagement.
Hub practice contribution
- Maintain and continuously improve the hub’s session library, experience journeys and facilitation assets.
- Retire outdated formats and recommend new experiences based on client demand, technology developments and market priorities.
- Feed client insights and recurring demand themes into the hub’s use-case and prototyping backlog.
- Codify reusable facilitation formats, journey designs and prototype playbooks.
- Contribute to thought leadership, market eminence and the external visibility of the Riyadh Innovation Hub.
- Share lessons and leading practices across EY’s broader wavespace and innovation center network.
Skills and attributes for success
To be successful in this role, you will bring:
- Executive presence: The credibility and confidence to lead C-suite, board and ministerial audiences through intensive discussions and contested topics toward clear decisions.
- Immersive experience design: The ability to design journeys across physical spaces, content, live technology and key experience moments rather than relying primarily on presentation materials.
- Facilitation expertise: Strong command of facilitation, Design Thinking and co-creation methods, with the judgment to adapt approaches to the client problem.
- Applied technology fluency: The ability to explain generative AI, agentic AI, digital twins, simulation, automation and data-enabled products in practical business terms, including their capabilities and limitations.
- Prototype direction: Experience defining and directing prototypes and proofs of concept in collaboration with designers and engineers.
- Commercial mindset: The ability to connect client experiences to measurable outcomes, qualified opportunities and follow-on work for EY.
- Strategic thinking: Strong problem-framing, storytelling, synthesis and decision-support capabilities.
- Global client perspective: The ability to work effectively with multinational executive teams and international technology partners, adapting your approach across cultures, sectors and levels of seniority.
- Stakeholder management: The confidence to collaborate with senior account leaders, sector teams, service lines, alliance partners, technical teams and external agencies.
- Responsible innovation: An understanding of responsible AI, security, privacy, governance and ethical considerations within technology-enabled transformation.
To qualify for the role, you must have
- Between 8 and 12 years of progressively senior experience across consulting, strategy, client-facing innovation or a related field.
- At least three years of experience within an innovation center, executive briefing center, customer experience center or comparable immersive client environment.
- A proven record of leading high-stakes sessions for C-suite executives, board members or ministerial-level audiences.
- Significant experience supporting multinational organizations and international clients, ideally within a global network of innovation or experience centers.
- External consulting, advisory, innovation studio or senior client-facing experience. Experience limited solely to internal program facilitation will not be sufficient.
- Demonstrated experience designing client engagements in which live technology, demonstrations or immersive media were central to the experience.
- A proven record of directing prototypes or proofs of concept with designers and engineers, from initial problem framing through validation.
- Working fluency in generative AI, agentic AI, automation and data, at the level required to frame use cases and constructively challenge solution choices.
- Strong storytelling, structured thinking and synthesis skills.
- The ability to operate effectively in situations involving uncertainty, complexity and changing priorities.
- Evidence of converting client sessions into practical commercial next steps, such as proposals, pilots or follow-on engagements.
- Excellent written and spoken English, with the executive presence required to lead senior international audiences.
Ideally, you’ll also have
- A degree or recognized qualification in innovation, Design Thinking, service design, product management, artificial intelligence, technology, business or a related discipline.
- Experience establishing, launching or relaunching an innovation or client experience center.
- Experience working with clients in the energy, infrastructure, industrial or public sectors.
- Experience collaborating with technology alliance partners, including cloud providers, software companies and hardware vendors.
- Hands-on familiarity with low-code, no-code, generative AI or rapid prototyping environments.
- A recognized facilitation certification.
- A visible contribution to thought leadership, innovation communities or relevant industry forums.
- Arabic-language capabilities.
- Current residence in Riyadh. Candidates based elsewhere may be considered on a case-by-case basis.
What we look for
We are looking for a credible, curious and composed senior practitioner who can move confidently between executive conversation, immersive experience design and applied technology.
You will be equally comfortable guiding a ministerial audience through a live simulation, challenging the assumptions behind an AI use case, and briefing designers or engineers on what a prototype needs to demonstrate.
You will bring experience working with multinational clients and global innovation environments, a strong bias toward action and the judgment to determine when an idea is ready to move from exploration into prototype, proof of concept or business delivery.
What success looks like
Success in this role will be demonstrated through:
- Senior executive sessions that consistently produce clear decisions, aligned stakeholders and actionable outputs.
- Clients progressing between the hub’s experience formats, such as moving from discovery into co-creation or prototyping.
- Promising ideas progressing through well-governed prototypes supported by clear evidence and defined handover decisions.
- Hub engagements converting into qualified opportunities, proposals, pilots and follow-on work for EY service lines.
- Positive recognition from clients and account teams of the hub as a differentiated, technology-enabled environment for innovation and decision-making.
- Reusable experience formats, facilitation methods and prototype playbooks that strengthen the overall hub practice.
What we offer you
At EY, we’ll develop you with future-focused skills and equip you with world-class experiences. We’ll empower you in a flexible environment and fuel you and your extraordinary talents in a diverse and inclusive culture of globally connected teams.
We work together across our full spectrum of services and skills, powered by technology and AI, so that business, people and the planet can thrive together.
We’re committed to fostering an environment where everyone feels valued, supported and able to succeed.
Are you ready to shape your future with confidence? Apply today.