Fractional AI CTO · "The Abbot"

Senior AI leadership, without the full-time hire.

If you've got AI ambitions but no one to own them, we give you the strategy and the hands to ship — at a fraction of the cost of a full-time executive. From $7,500/mo.

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Josh Cruz
Founder · CTO · Applied AI Engineer

Digital Monestary is led by Josh Cruz — a product-minded CTO based in Redding, CA. Josh has built and led cross-functional engineering teams of 25+, architected fintech and alternative-investment platforms from the ground up, and pioneered production AI tooling — including moving entire teams onto agentic AI workflows and updating SOC 2 governance to put AI to work under human-in-the-loop oversight. He believes in good people and good systems aimed at doing right by the people he serves, and gives back through his tech YouTube channel and the local R.A.D.D. tech meetup.

For growing businesses that need a tech leader, not a hire.

Founders and operators of growing SMBs who want senior AI leadership — a roadmap, real builds, and someone to own the technical calls — without the cost, equity, and risk of a full-time CTO.

  • An AI roadmap tied to revenue, not hype — what to build first, what to skip.
  • Hands-on builds and architecture — real code and systems, not just advice.
  • Technical leadership for your team and your vendors.
  • AI governance and compliance (SOC 2, human-in-the-loop) so AI ships safely.
  • Senior judgment — part-time, on call, at a fraction of a full-time hire.

Automation work that paid for itself.

A decade of building systems that give people their time and revenue back — across fintech, insurance, finance and manufacturing.

Insurance · enterprise sales

Sales reps were drowning in a messy pipeline.

The problem

A national insurance brokerage's sales team was buried in tangled backend data — stale leads, manual cleanup, no clear view of what to work next. Good opportunities were quietly dying.

What we built

Clean, modular pipeline tools — custom Kanban boards and pop-up workflows — plus automated lead enrichment and a smart engine that continuously re-routes or retires stale leads.

$1.7M
in additional sales revenue, with pipelines that manage themselves
Equipment finance · operations

A whole department was losing thousands of hours to busywork.

The problem

A national equipment-finance lender ran core processes by hand — slow, error-prone, impossible to scale. Applications crawled and staff time evaporated.

What we built

Custom dashboards and automated, step-by-step workflows that took over the busywork and doubled how fast applications moved.

2,200+
hours saved in one department · 2× faster · ~$450K/yr in efficiency
Fintech · alternative investments

Complex partner payouts were a manual, error-prone mess.

The problem

A fintech platform needed to launch alternative-investment products across multiple white-label partners — with tangled, multi-party revenue splits nobody wanted to calculate by hand.

What we built

We architected the platform from the ground up and built an autonomous, multi-tier revenue-split and billing engine on Stripe Connect — plus self-serve analytics.

100%
automated payouts, shipped across multiple partner brands
Manufacturing · software

Costly downtime — and a platform hitting its limits.

The problem

A manufacturing software company was fighting expensive equipment downtime while its own system kept bumping against processing ceilings.

What we built

An AI-driven solution to cut downtime, plus a re-architected data layer (Platform Events) broken into modular blocks customers can extend without code.

10×
event-processing capacity · less downtime · no-code extensibility

Results delivered by our founder across 12+ years of building and leading engineering teams.

Senior AI leadership at a third of the price.

A full-time CTO runs $250K–$450K a year once you add equity and benefits. A fractional engagement gives you most of the value, none of the overhead — and you can stop any month.

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from $7,500 /mo

Scoped to the hours and scope you actually need.

  • ~⅓ the cost of a full-time CTO
  • 3–10× typical return on the engagement
  • Month-to-month — a 30-day exit, never locked in
  • Live in ~2 weeks, not a 4–6 month executive search

Where are you trying to go?

Bring us your AI ambitions and your constraints. We'll tell you honestly what's worth building, in what order — and we can build it.

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