Applied Ai Engineer / AI Workflow & Automation Consultant

Applied AI Engineer / AI Workflow & Automation Consultant

Company: Samson Extracts

Location: Geneva, Alabama / Hybrid or Remote Considered with travel

Employment Type: Contract to start with potential to Full-Time

Position Overview

Samson Extracts is seeking a hands-on Applied AI Engineer / AI Workflow & Automation Consultant to help us identify, build, and implement practical AI solutions across our organization.

We operate in a data-heavy agricultural and manufacturing environment that includes cultivation and biomass sourcing, extraction and production, inventory management, quality, sales, finance, forecasting, and administrative operations.

We are not looking for someone whose primary focus is presenting AI strategy, conducting general AI training, or simply recommending software. We are looking for someone who can sit with our teams, understand how work is actually being performed today, identify where AI and automation can improve that work, and then help us build and deploy the solution.

The right person will be equally comfortable understanding a production workflow, analyzing a dataset, automating a sales process, building an AI agent, connecting systems through APIs, or creating a forecasting model.

Our goal is simple: use AI to make Samson more efficient, more data-driven, more predictive, and easier to operate.

What You'll Be Doing

You will work directly with leadership and teams across Sales, Operations, Production, Agriculture, Quality, Finance, Inventory, and Administration to understand existing processes and identify opportunities for AI, automation, and better use of data.

Responsibilities may include:

AI Workflow Development & Automation

1. Evaluate repetitive, manual, document-heavy, and data-heavy processes throughout the company and determine where AI or automation can improve them.
2. Design, build, test, and deploy AI-assisted workflows using tools such as OpenAI, Claude, Microsoft/Azure AI, Gemini, agent frameworks, APIs, and automation platforms.
3. Develop AI agents and automated workflows capable of completing multi-step business processes with appropriate human review.
4. Build integrations between existing business systems rather than requiring employees to continually move information manually between platforms.
5. Develop internal AI tools that allow employees and management to retrieve, analyze, and act on company information more efficiently.
6. Establish safeguards, validation processes, human-in-the-loop controls, and appropriate escalation paths for AI-generated outputs.

Sales & Business Development

Help us improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our sales organization through AI and automation, including:

1. Automated lead identification and prospect research.
2. Lead qualification and prioritization.
3. CRM automation and improved sales data discipline.
4. Automated follow-up workflows.
5. Sales pipeline analysis and forecasting.
6. Identification of inactive or at-risk accounts.
7. Customer purchasing pattern analysis.
8. Pricing and margin analysis.
9. Automated preparation of account summaries and meeting information.
10. Website lead capture, conversion tracking, and sales funnel optimization.
11. Exploration and implementation of AI sales agents where appropriate.

The objective is not simply to increase sales activity, but to help the sales team determine who to contact, when to contact them, why an opportunity matters, and what action should happen next.

Manufacturing & Production Intelligence

Work with production and operations leadership to improve how manufacturing data is analyzed and used.

Potential projects include:

1. Production dashboards and automated KPI reporting.
2. Yield tracking and variance identification.
3. Biomass-to-crude, crude-to-distillate, and distillate-to-finished-product conversion analysis.
4. Identification of production trends and anomalies.
5. Batch and lot performance comparisons.
6. Production capacity modeling.
7. Labor utilization and staffing analysis.
8. Downtime and bottleneck analysis.
9. Production scheduling optimization.
10. Predictive identification of processes that are moving outside expected performance ranges.
11. Automated reporting from manufacturing and inventory systems.
12. Identification of the operating conditions associated with our highest-performing production runs.

The goal is to move from primarily reviewing historical information to increasingly answering questions such as:

What is happening? Why is it happening? What is likely to happen next? What should we change?

Agricultural & Supply Forecasting

Develop analytical and AI-driven tools that improve our ability to forecast agricultural supply and manufacturing requirements.

Potential projects may include:

1. Crop and biomass yield forecasting.
2. Raw material availability forecasting.
3. Potency and material-quality analysis.
4. Conversion modeling from agricultural input through finished product.
5. Raw material requirements planning based on forecasted sales.
6. Inventory depletion forecasting.
7. Purchasing recommendations.
8. Production demand forecasting.
9. Seasonality analysis.
10. Scenario modeling.

Ultimately, we want better visibility from seed and agricultural input through manufacturing, inventory, and customer demand.

Data & Systems

Samson currently operates across multiple systems and data sources, including our manufacturing and inventory platform, accounting systems, CRM, spreadsheets, website/e-commerce platforms, and other operational tools.

This position will help us:

1. Connect currently disconnected data sources.
2. Reduce reliance on spreadsheet exports and manual reporting.
3. Build reliable data pipelines where appropriate.
4. Structure operational data so it can be used effectively by AI tools.
5. Determine when an API, automation platform, database, AI agent, or traditional software solution is the appropriate answer.
6. Develop management dashboards and automated reporting.
7. Create a more centralized source of operational intelligence.
8. Improve data quality and identify gaps that prevent meaningful analysis.

Experience integrating with systems such as Quickbase, Shopify, CRM platforms, Microsoft 365, accounting platforms, APIs, SQL databases, Power BI, or similar business systems would be valuable.

Administrative Efficiency

Identify opportunities to reduce time spent on routine administrative work, including:

1. Document creation and document review.
2. SOP and policy management.
3. Meeting summaries and action-item tracking.
4. Automated management reporting.
5. Email and communication workflows.
6. Purchasing and vendor analysis.
7. Invoice and financial-data review.
8. Quality and compliance documentation.
9. Employee onboarding and internal knowledge retrieval.
10. Executive reporting and decision-support tools.

What We're Looking For

We are looking for someone who has actually built AI solutions, not someone whose experience is primarily discussing AI transformation.

Strong candidates will have experience with several of the following:

1. Building and deploying LLM-powered applications or workflows.
2. OpenAI APIs and/or other commercial LLM platforms.
3. AI agents and agentic workflow design.
4. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
5. Prompt and context engineering.
6. API integrations.
7. Python.
8. SQL and database concepts.
9. Workflow automation platforms such as Make, Zapier, n8n, Power Automate, or similar.
10. Data analysis and data visualization.
11. Forecasting and predictive analytics.
12. Business intelligence tools.
13. Cloud platforms and AI services.
14. Building solutions that interact with existing enterprise systems.

Candidates should understand AI limitations including hallucinations, data quality issues, security concerns, validation requirements, and situations where AI is not the appropriate solution.

Ideal Background

We are open to candidates coming from several backgrounds, including:

1. Applied AI Engineer
2. GenAI Engineer
3. AI Automation Engineer
4. AI Workflow Architect
5. AI Solutions Architect
6. Forward-Deployed AI Engineer
7. AI/ML Engineer
8. Data Engineer with applied AI experience
9. AI Automation Consultant
10. Technical AI Business Analyst with significant hands-on development experience

Experience in manufacturing, agriculture, supply chain, CPG, pharmaceutical, food production, chemical processing, or another operationally complex environment would be highly valuable.

Experience working with regulated industries or environments requiring strong documentation, validation, auditability, and data controls is also preferred.

What Will Make Someone Successful Here

This position requires someone who is curious enough to spend time understanding how the business actually works before trying to automate it.

You should be comfortable walking through a manufacturing process with an operator in the morning, reviewing production data with leadership in the afternoon, and then building a prototype that solves the problem. You should be able to communicate with employees who have very different levels of technical experience and translate business problems into practical technical solutions.

Most importantly, you should be someone who likes to build things that get used.

We are less interested in impressive AI demonstrations than we are in solutions that save employees hours, improve yields, identify problems earlier, increase sales conversion, improve forecasting, or give management better information to make decisions.

Why This Role Is Different

Samson is not beginning with a theoretical AI initiative.

We already have years of manufacturing, agricultural, inventory, sales, laboratory, and operational data. Our opportunity is to turn that information into better decisions and then automate the processes around those decisions.

This person will have the opportunity to help build the AI infrastructure and workflows that influence how an agricultural and manufacturing company operates; from raw material and production through finished product and customer sale.

We are looking for someone who wants to move beyond AI demonstrations and help us determine what an AI-enabled manufacturing company actually looks like in practice.