// tech & AI consultant · CTO advisor

From AI adoption to AI delivery

I help CEOs and CTOs of banks, fintech and product companies turn AI adoption into measurable delivery gains, by fixing the tools, the tech and the teams together. 20+ years hands-on, from writing Java to CTO at monobank’s marketplace.

Mikalai Alimenkou
  • 20+years hands-on in software delivery
  • 1,000+engineers trained in AI development
  • 200+talks at conferences and meetups
  • 60+client companies
// clients

Clients

  • monobank
  • Raiffeisen Bank
  • Sense Bank
  • Bank Alliance
  • UPC
  • Fintech Farm
  • Checkbox
  • Pine Software
  • SimCorp
  • Kyriba
  • YayPay
  • WorkFusion
  • Integrity Vision
  • Forex Tester
  • Vodafone
  • Ajax Systems
  • Flo
  • DepositPhotos
  • Playtika
  • GR8 Tech
  • PandaDoc
  • MEGOGO
  • ATB
  • ivia
  • Materialise
  • EPAM
  • ELEKS
  • Exadel
  • Intellias
  • SPD Technology
  • Softengi
  • MEV
  • Altoros
  • SaM Solutions
  • VISO
  • TIW
  • Whirl Software
// the model

The AI Delivery Gap

Most companies are already through AI adoption: licences bought, tools rolled out, token dashboards glowing. Yet delivery hasn’t moved. The gap sits between the two phases.

01

Adoption

Everyone uses the tools. Measured by breadth: who uses AI, how often, for what.

✓ done by most companies
02

Delivery

The business ships faster and better. Measured by outcomes: lead time, quality, cost of change.

→ where the value is

Why companies get stuck: AI pays off only when three layers change together

  1. 01Tools

    models · agentic frameworks · harnesses · knowledge base

    Agents are only as good as the environment and context you give them.

  2. 02Tech

    architecture · engineering practices · quality assurance · guardrails

    Faster code generation hits the same bottlenecks: tangled architecture, slow pipelines, fragile tests. Without guardrails, risk reaches production faster too.

  3. 03Teams

    roles · skills · metrics · team & org design

    If roles, skills and metrics stay the same, the speed-up disappears in handoffs and queues.

Most consultants work on one layer. I work on all three: two decades as an architect and CTO on the tech side, and as an org and agile coach on the team side.

// how I can help

Ways to work together

  • 014–8 weeks

    AI Strategy

    A clear, realistic plan for getting delivery gains from AI, not just licences.

    • Assessment of your current state across tools, tech and teams
    • Target AI-assisted SDLC: how software gets built with agents
    • Company-level agentic platform and knowledge management design
    • Roadmap from adoption to delivery, with metrics for each stage
  • 023–6 months

    AI Delivery Program

    Hands-on implementation that moves from pilot teams to the whole engineering organisation.

    • AI champions network and company-wide education program
    • Pilot teams to prove and tune the approach
    • Agentic platform build-out alongside your engineers
    • Delivery metrics and scaling to all teams
  • 03Monthly retainer · 3+ months

    Fractional CTO / CTO Advisor

    Senior technical leadership without a full-time hire, or an interim CTO while you find one.

    • 2–8 days a month as a CTO advisor
    • Or interim CTO for up to 9 months
    • Architecture, org design, hiring leaders, engineering culture
    • A sparring partner for CEO and CTO decisions
  • 04In-house · online or on-site

    Team trainings & bootcamps

    Practical, hands-on trainings that change how engineers work the next day.

    • AI-assisted development and agentic engineering
    • Engineering practices, architecture and quality
    • Bootcamps and multi-week programs for teams of any size
    Featured trainings ↓
  • 0545 min – half a day

    Keynotes & leadership sessions

    Talks and workshops that give leadership teams a shared language for the AI shift.

    • Keynotes (45–60 min) for conferences and internal events
    • Leadership workshops (2–4 hours)
    • In English, Ukrainian or Russian

Every engagement starts with a 30-minute intro call. No fixed price list: scope and format are shaped around your situation.

Book a call →
// selected work

Case studies

  1. 01 / 05AI strategy

    Growing fintech in Central & Eastern Europe

    500+ engineers

    AI strategy consultant

    Challenge

    Make AI a company-wide engineering capability rather than a collection of individual tools.

    What I did

    • Created the AI strategy together with leadership and led its implementation
    • Redesigned the SDLC around AI-assisted development
    • Designed a custom agentic platform at the organisation level
    • Set up organisational knowledge management for people and agents

    Result

    AI built into the way software is made: one SDLC, one agentic platform for the whole organisation, and shared knowledge that agents can use.

  2. 02 / 05AI adoption

    One of the leading service companies in Central & Eastern Europe

    1,000+ engineers

    AI adoption consultant and trainer

    Challenge

    Roll out AI development tools across a large engineering organisation, and make sure people actually use them well.

    What I did

    • Led the adoption of AI development tools
    • Ran a wide education program for 200+ employees
    • Built and supported an internal group of AI champions

    Result

    200+ employees trained, and an internal AI champions group in place to keep adoption moving from the inside.

  3. 03 / 05Fintech

    monobank

    Ukraine’s largest neobank

    Organisational & tech consultant, CTO advisor · 2023–2025

    Challenge

    Grow organisational maturity and system stability across a fast-growing company, without losing its speed and culture.

    What I did

    • Led a company-wide organisational transformation
    • Hired new leaders to grow organisational maturity and engineering culture
    • Introduced engineering practices and processes that improve system stability for users

    Result

    A more mature organisation with new leaders and stronger engineering practices behind a product used by millions.

    Also served as interim CTO of Market by Mono: OKRs for the whole product team, engineering scaled 6× in 6 months, LeSS across 6+ teams, features delivered to 9M+ users.

  4. 04 / 05Fintech

    Fintech Farm

    Builds digital banks in emerging markets

    Organisational consultant, CTO advisor · 2022–2023

    Challenge

    Scale product development across many teams while the architecture keeps evolving.

    What I did

    • Implemented LeSS with 8+ development teams
    • Evolved the microservices architecture
    • Improved engineering practices and release management

    Result

    8+ teams working as one product organisation, on an evolving microservices architecture with a stronger release process.

  5. 05 / 05Banking

    Raiffeisen Bank Ukraine

    One of Ukraine’s largest banks

    Digital transformation consultant, CIO advisor · 2020–2022

    Challenge

    Turn a large traditional bank into a modern engineering organisation.

    What I did

    • Company-wide digital transformation, including organisational design
    • New developer hiring process focused on a modern stack and engineering culture
    • Microservices architecture and migration of legacy systems
    • Internal developer platform built on an open-source stack
    • Technical leadership of the Fairo product across multiple teams

    Result

    A new engineering culture built around Continuous Delivery and collaboration, backed by trainings and workshops across the bank.

Mikalai Alimenkou
Warsaw, Poland · remote across Europe · on-site in EU & Ukraine
// about

Hi, I’m Mikalai

I’ve been building software since 2004: Java developer, tech lead, solution architect, delivery manager, CTO. Since 2017 I’ve worked as an independent consultant, helping banks, fintech and product companies with architecture, engineering practices and organisational change.

Today my focus is AI: helping engineering organisations move from using AI tools to actually delivering faster with them. I also teach engineers AI-assisted development and agentic engineering: more than 1,000 so far.

In 2009 I founded XP Injection, my training company. I also founded the JEEConf, XP Days Ukraine and Selenium Camp conferences.

Works in English · Ukrainian · Russian

// teaching

Hands-on trainings for engineering teams through XP Injection, my training company since 2009: AI-assisted development, agentic engineering, engineering practices, technologies, architecture, Agile and more. More than 1,000 engineers trained in AI development so far.

Engineers gathered around Mikalai at a flip chart during a Q&A session
Q&A session
Mikalai talking to a room of engineers, with code on the screen behind him
Deep dive
Mikalai at a flip chart during a workshop
Workshop
Mikalai walking through code projected on the screen
Live demo

Featured trainings

AI

Effective development with Claude Code

Make Claude Code a full member of the team: from LLM basics and model management to context engineering, flexible configuration, MCP, hooks, skills and subagents, rolled out safely into team workflows and CI/CD.

12 modules × 3 h · Java/Python developers, architects, tech leads

Full program →
AI

Building autonomous AI agents with LangChain and LangGraph

Build AI agents that know your organisation and act on it: custom knowledge, tools and MCP, memory and context engineering, guardrails, agentic patterns in LangGraph, a custom harness and full observability.

9 modules × 3 h · Java/Python developers, architects, tech leads

Full program →
Spring Boot

Diagnostics and troubleshooting of Spring Boot apps

Find and fix slowdowns, memory leaks and strange errors fast: logs, metrics and traces with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana and Jaeger, plus thread and heap dump analysis on real-world cases.

6 modules × 3 h · Java developers, architects, tech leads

Full program →
Full training catalogue at XP Injection →
// speaking

200+ talks at conferences and meetups since 2008: AI and agentic engineering, architecture, Java, Spring Boot, engineering practices, Agile, QA processes, infrastructure and more.

Mikalai on stage at WAWTECH, next to a slide introducing him
WAWTECH
Mikalai giving a talk at JavaDay
JavaDay
Mikalai speaking to a full room at Agile Rock
Agile Rock
Mikalai pointing at a slide during a talk at Selenium Camp
Selenium Camp

Featured talks

2025

Effective Agentic AI Development with Specs, Skills and Old Good Design Patterns

WAWTech 2025

2021

Who is an IT consultant and how to be an expert in everything

InterviewDOU 2021

2020

Rise and Fall of story points. Capacity-based planning from the trenches.

Simplicity Day: Agile Magic 2020

2019

Wasteful waste or why everything is usually so slow in development

Selenium Camp 2019 · JEEConf 2019 · Voxxed Days Minsk 2019

2019

Saga about distributed business transactions in microservices world

XP Days Ukraine 2019

2019

DevOps checklist or how to understand where is your team in DevOps landscape

XP Days Ukraine 2018 · DelEx 2019

Full talks catalogue →
// writing

Latest posts

All posts →
// next step

Let’s talk about your AI delivery gap

A 30-minute intro call: you tell me where you are, I tell you honestly whether and how I can help.