Askona — Enterprise Architecture and AI Transformation

Role: architecture/engineering leadership in CTO scope | Span: 20+ teams, 40+ services

Led a controlled digital and AI transformation in a high-stakes enterprise environment to speed up delivery, improve reliability, and institutionalize architecture standards without breaking business continuity.

Situation

• Context: large enterprise (15M customers, 9000+ employees, $680M+ revenue).
• Architecture landscape: hybrid cloud + on-prem, 40+ services, high integration complexity.
• Business pressure: faster change delivery with no compromise in stability.
• Critical risk: conservative teams, low business engagement, and over-ambitious change scope.

Task

• Increase release cadence and time-to-market without production instability.
• Reduce delivery friction across teams and systems.
• Modernize legacy under controlled governance.
• Move AI from demos into real operating workflows.

Action

• Coordinated transformation across 20+ distributed teams under one architecture frame.
• Institutionalized event-driven integration (Kafka/RabbitMQ/API) as a core operating pattern.
• Implemented platform governance and high-availability standards.
• Shifted execution to phased rollout instead of a big-bang rewrite.
• Led AI seminars, workshops, and 1:1 enablement with teams and managers.
• Introduced practical RAG, AI-assisted coding, and AI use cases for delivery and business decisions.

Skills applied

• Enterprise architecture and coordination of 20+ distributed teams across 40+ services.
• Event-driven integration (Kafka, RabbitMQ, APIs) to reduce integration friction.
• Platform governance, high availability, and phased legacy modernization without a “big bang.”
• AI enablement: RAG, AI-assisted / vibe coding, and applied AI patterns within security constraints.
• AI leadership: seminars, workshops, and 1:1 guidance for teams and management.
• Transformation management with a strong focus on business continuity and production stability.

Result

Operational impact

stable gains visible in first 2 years

Cultural impact

by year 3-4 teams defended new standards

Architecture impact

event-driven principles became company standard

Org impact

AI practices evolved into a dedicated AI department

Public Askona business context from open sources: 2023 revenue under RAS was RUB 49.12B (vs RUB 40.94B in 2022), and for key legal entity "TD Askona" open 2024 reports mention RUB 41B revenue and RUB 1.2B net profit. These figures describe company-level performance and are not a direct attribution to this transformation alone.

Case Materials

• youtube: YouTube channel
• distributed asynchronous systems course: YouTube playlist
• blog (ru): dobryakov.com/blog