Mikhail Plotnikov

Mikhail Plotnikov

  • AI Product Owner
  • AI Transformation Lead
  • AI Product Engineer

Co-owner and CEO of an advertising agency since 2014.

mike-plotnikov@mail.ruTelegram @mplotnikovgithub.com/mikeplotnikov

Mikhail Plotnikov

What I do

AI Product Owner / Head of AI

Co-owner and CEO of an advertising agency since 2014. Since 2025 I own and ship my own AI products: a mobile app with 100+ live users on RuStore and the App Store, a speech-analytics product in production, a data parser in production. I decide on measurements, not demos: 26 LLMs benchmarked before picking one, cost per analysis known to the ruble. I build, not just manage.

AI Transformation Lead (project-based)

I audit business processes and deploy agents and automation into a company's daily work. Current project: AI process audit and automation discovery for UnionPipe (St. Petersburg). I moved my own agency onto an agentic workflow: monthly client reports, contractor reconciliation, parsers, outreach. Method: written spec, two review waves, decision log, negative results recorded honestly.

AI Product Engineer / Forward Deployed Engineer

I build and ship LLM systems with measurable quality. Model choice by data: a bake-off of 26 LLMs and 8 STT engines on one corpus, blind grading, "fabricated quotes" as the key metric. Data stays inside Russian infrastructure. Agent-driven development: Claude Code and Codex CLI work from my specs, cross-model review waves, releases and incidents are mine. 17 years in advertising, so I understand the customer before they have finished stating the problem.

Key results

  • Speech analytics for sales calls: in production since 2026-09-16; 26 LLMs × 31 recordings ≈ 2,000 analyses and 8 STT engines × 31 = 248 runs before the model choice; the chosen model matches human analysis at 96.8 %, 2 fabricated quotes out of 227, 3.74 RUB per analysis. 5,782 backend and 269 frontend tests in CI.

  • "Live with Flowers! Florist", bookkeeping and CRM for florists: 100+ live users including corporate accounts, organic daily growth. RuStore and App Store. Scan cost ≈ 4.26 RUB. The 2026-10-12 Yandex data-center outage was diagnosed and closed by swapping the STT engine.

  • Data parser for a media project: v1.2 in production, full run 69.5 min, 326 of 327 objects, 3,440 cells; 1,164 tests, mutation analysis as a quality gate.

  • Kapika, e-commerce performance: August 2026 — 1,619 sales (×4.2 vs July), 14.93 M RUB, ROAS 713 %; September — 950 sales, ROAS 539 %. Brand lift 26.9 → 32.9 % in Russia, 18 → 27 % in Kazakhstan.

  • Zoom brand (Atex) created from scratch: brand identity 2025, acceptance act signed 2025-10-14 without remarks.

  • artel, an agentic development framework: 10 skills, automatic model selection and failover on rate limits; review-wave log of 346 entries, Claude → Codex delegation log of 318 entries. Review waves caught defects in the previous wave's fixes: 31 → 9 → 4.

Products and projects

2025 — present · AI products and AI transformation · own products and projects

Product owner, spec author, architect, reviewer. Code is written by agents (Claude Code, Codex CLI) from my specifications.

  • UnionPipe, St. Petersburg (current):

    business-process audit, discovery of automation and optimization opportunities with AI.

  • Speech analytics for sales calls (B2B, clients not disclosed):

    Python 3.12, FastAPI, PostgreSQL 16 with row-level security, React 19. Anonymization before any LLM call, audio never leaves Russia, Russian providers only (Cloud.ru, Yandex AI Studio, GigaChat). Nightly ingestion and encrypted backups with a byte-for-byte restore drill. 2,564 commits since 2026-06-30. Second opinion from a judge model of a different family.

  • "Live with Flowers! Florist":

    Flutter + FastAPI, on-device document scanning, golden tests, 6 CI pipelines. 1,322 commits since 2026-02-13. Monetization in preparation.

  • Data parser (client not disclosed):

    deterministic, no LLM, GitHub Actions as a serverless runtime, Google Sheets as the client's live interface.

  • artel:

    my own agentic development framework, built from scratch on principles learned from shipping products: spec → implementation in fresh workers → two cross-family review waves → owner gate. Hooks instead of rules in prose. Compatible with external reviewer agents.

  • llm-practice:

    an applied LLM knowledge base built from my own measured runs (DeepSeek, local qwen3): 80 entries, 496 source locators.

  • STAT (СТАТЬ),

    a media platform on raising children through sport (vk.ru/prosport_stat, instagram.com/prosport_stat, youtube.com/@Prosport_stat, t.me/prosport_stat): producer — commercial side, media kits, sponsor sales. Season 1 (2026): 10 episodes, 5.45 M monthly reach as of 2026-09-07, ×17 growth over the season.

  • Digital respondents:

    synthetic interviews with a validity gate; 958 tests, a full rehearsal for $5.50. No commercial launch.

beta agency

2012 — present · beta advertising agency (BETA MARKETING LLC)

2014 — present · co-owner, COO and CEO.

A team of 10+ people, including production. I run client relationships personally: strategy, negotiation, approvals; the team executes.

  • Clients: Apteka.ru (Katren), Kapika, Torex, TORES, InTime, Skyn, Zoom (Atex).
  • Media strategy and effect measurement: brand lift, sales lift, Mediascope, TRP. Russian advertising law compliance: Federal Law 38, ad labeling and the ERIR registry.
  • The agency runs on an agentic workflow: monthly Kapika reports are assembled by skills, reconciliation with the contractor finds the contractor's errors; parsers for VK, Telegram, Wordstat, Wildberries; cold email with address verification; an editorial pipeline fact-checked by a different model.
  • Cold B2B outreach 2026: 1,400+ emails across several campaigns, 0 deals. Recorded honestly, hypotheses closed.
  • Recalculated a client deck before sending: 129 of 149 rows carried someone else's numbers.

2012 — 2014 · head of special projects.

Sponsorship and special projects. 2012 milestones: Mary Kay, Cinema Park.

2009 — 2012 · Alcasar · TV advertising sales manager

Method

AI-driven development and orchestration

Claude Code (skills, subagents, hooks, worktrees), Codex CLI as executor with explicit model and effort, a four-criteria delegation gate, two-wave "author ≠ reviewer" review, model routing recorded as decisions. 45 skills, 22 agents, 10 hooks in the working system.

Evals and measurement

Own harnesses: bake-offs, blind grading, pre-registered thresholds, Wilson intervals, Fisher's test, bootstrap; mutation testing as a test-quality gate. No eval platforms used (promptfoo, Langfuse).

Skills

LLM and agents

  • Model selection by data (cost per correct answer)
  • strict schemas and response validation
  • hallucination control through verbatim quotes checked in code
  • LLM-as-judge from a different model family
  • RAG with citations and out-of-corpus refusals (course systems, bge-m3, reranker)
  • agents with three-layer memory, FSM and invariants
  • MCP (own servers in Go, Context7, DeepWiki)
  • token economics
  • local models (Ollama qwen3, GigaAM on CPU)

Backend and data

  • Python: FastAPI, Pydantic v2, SQLAlchemy 2, Alembic, PostgreSQL 16
  • multi-tenancy via row-level security
  • idempotent APIs, nightly workers, retries
  • encrypted backups with restore drills
  • Calltouch and Bitrix24 integrations
  • Telegram bots (aiogram)
  • Frontend: TypeScript, React 19, Vite, TanStack Query
  • Mobile: Flutter, Riverpod, RuStore and App Store releases
  • Go: 87K lines over a course

DevOps and CI

  • GitHub Actions: CI, manually triggered deploys, nightly backups, restore checks, migration rehearsals, cron as a runtime
  • protected main (the agent never merges or deploys)
  • Docker Compose, Nginx/Caddy
  • Yandex Cloud, Cloud.ru, Timeweb, Cloudflare Pages
  • gitleaks, pip-audit
  • No Kubernetes, AWS or GCP

Product and management

  • Agency P&L
  • management of a team of 10+ people including production
  • stakeholder management up to the client's executives
  • discovery and requirements elicitation
  • spec-driven process
  • decision logs
  • honest recording of negative results
  • content producing (Kartoziya school)

Languages

  • Russian native
  • English: technical documentation and written communication

Education

  • Saratov State University, Quality Management, 2011.
  • Moscow State University, Higher School of Television, professional program "Creative Producer", 2024–2025.
  • Nikolai Kartoziya's School of Producing, media producer diploma, 2024–2025.
  • One-year "Product Manager" course, Mail.ru Group, 2021.
  • Winner, "Digital Breakthrough" national hackathon, Transport & Logistics track, 2021.
  • Entrepreneur Tracker program, 2023.
  • AI Advent Challenge #9 (Mobile Developer), 2026: 35 tasks in Go, weeks on MCP, RAG and local LLMs; 117 test files.

Ways to work together

Full-time, or a project-based AI transformation engagement. Remote or hybrid. Happy to start with a project: process audit → automation plan → implementation with measurements.

Email me: mike-plotnikov@mail.ruMessage on Telegram: @mplotnikov