| Born | Maxim Votyakov Soviet Union |
|---|---|
| Residence | Boca Raton, Florida, U.S. |
| Education | I. M. Sechenov Moscow Medical Academy (Pharmacy) |
| Occupation | Technology entrepreneur |
| Years active | 2000–present |
| Known for | Co-founding Customertimes |
| Title | Co-founder and Managing Partner, Customertimes |
| Relatives | Veniamin Votyakov (grandfather) Boris Terentyev (great-grandfather) |
Max Votek (born Maxim Votyakov, Russian: Максим Вотяков) is a technology entrepreneur and enterprise software executive. He is best known as a co-founder and managing partner of Customertimes, a global IT consulting and product engineering company headquartered in New York, and as the head of the first official Salesforce partner in Russia and the CIS.[1][2][8] He is a member of the Forbes Technology Council, where he writes on enterprise technology and artificial intelligence.[11][13]
Votek was born into a family of medical doctors. His grandfather Veniamin Iosifovich Votyakov (1921–2014) was a Soviet virologist, academician of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and long-time director (1950–1986) of the Belarusian Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology, author of more than 770 scientific works.[20] His great-grandfather Boris Petrovich Terentyev (born 1899), professor at the Moscow Electrotechnical Institute of Communications, was one of the patriarchs of Soviet radio engineering: he led the construction of Moscow's first radio broadcast line and proposed the phase-locked loop technique still in use today.[22] Votek learned electronics in his laboratory as a child.[19]
Votek studied pharmacy at the I. M. Sechenov Moscow Medical Academy in the late 1990s, specialising in computer-aided drug design at the intersection of biochemistry and physics.[9][19] Early in his career he worked for the Russian Ministry of Health on the development of the country's national drug registration database.[19]
From 2000 to 2007 Votek worked at Solvay Pharmaceuticals, where he rose to regional head of Commercial Excellence and Sales Force Effectiveness, responsible for strategy, analytics and IT solutions for sales organisations across multiple countries.[10] He implemented SAP CRM for the company's sales organisation and delivered CRM training to medical representatives in twelve countries, later working as a freelance consultant for Siemens on one of the earliest global SAP CRM implementations.[19]
In 2007 Votek co-founded Customertimes with four partners, including chief executive Dimitri Sidney.[9] The company became an SAP partner in 2007 and a Salesforce partner in 2008; its CIS subsidiary CT Consulting, headed by Votek, was presented at the first Salesforce conference in Russia in May 2008 as the platform's first official partner in the country.[8][14] In February 2009 Votek announced that the company had obtained the right to accept payment for Salesforce services in rubles,[15] and that year it organised the first Salesforce conference in Ukraine[3] and a distribution partnership with the telecommunications operator Enforta.[4] Votek told TAdviser that the company had gained around twenty new clients in its first year of operation.[2] Early clients included Uniastrum Bank, Ascon, Sodexo's Russian division and Pharmstandard.[1][16] Speaking at the third annual Salesforce conference in Moscow in 2010, Votek reported that the company's revenue had grown 1.7-fold during the 2009 economic crisis and that its client base exceeded seventy organisations.[1]
Customertimes opened its first United States office in 2013 and is headquartered at 3 Columbus Circle, New York.[9][14] The company grew into a global enterprise technology firm with more than 1,000 employees serving clients in over 60 countries across consumer goods, pharmaceuticals and financial services,[5][9] and was recognised as a Leader in the ISG Provider Lens for Salesforce multicloud implementation and integration services.[9] Votek initiated and co-created the company's proprietary product line on the Salesforce platform, including CT Mobile, an offline-first mobile application for field sales, and the CT Pharma and CT CPG industry solutions, used by multinational consumer goods and pharmaceutical companies including L'Oréal, Danone, Bayer and Abbott.[21][19] In the 2020s the company expanded from CRM consulting into product engineering and AI-driven enterprise systems.[11][12]
Votek is a member of the Forbes Technology Council and a regular contributor to Forbes, writing on enterprise software, SaaS economics and applied artificial intelligence.[13] His commentary on the impact of AI on consulting workforces has been featured in Business Insider,[12] and his path from pharmacist to technology entrepreneur has been the subject of podcast interviews.[17] He also publishes essays on enterprise AI on his personal site and the Telegram channel «Мысли вслух».[18]
Votek has argued that the era of AI progress driven primarily by ever-larger models is ending, and that organisations should instead invest in "smarter systems" — specialised, collaborative agent architectures that prioritise reasoning and continuous learning over raw computational scale.[11] He compares the adoption of AI in enterprises to the historical transition from steam power to electricity, noting that early adopters initially replicated old structures before discovering the new technology's native advantages.[19] Writing for Forbes, he has also argued that enterprise software vendors must prepare for agentic commerce, a world in which "your next customer isn't human — it's their AI assistant".[13]
In a July 2026 as-told-to essay for Business Insider, Votek — drawing on his experience advising Fortune 500 companies on AI adoption — argued that companies "are rushing to blame layoffs on artificial intelligence" when many cuts reflect restructuring that had been planned beforehand, and that anticipated AI savings are frequently absorbed by token costs, infrastructure, licensing and security spending rather than converted into profit.[12] He called on companies to publicly disclose how AI-driven savings are used: "If AI-driven profitability is flowing into employee bonuses, lower client pricing, or investments that improve the business, companies should say so."[12] The essay was republished by Business Insider's German and African editions and covered by international outlets including Hyper.AI and German business media.[23]
In 2026 Customertimes published the Agentic SDLC Report, formalising Votek's approach to AI-assisted software delivery in which autonomous coding agents execute bounded units of work under senior engineers' direction — "the agents do the typing; the seniors do the deciding" — and estimating defensible savings of 15–40% of total project effort.[24]
Votek lives in Boca Raton, Florida. He is an avid surfer and has described innovation management in terms of surfing: "you need to paddle a lot ... and you need a team of innovators around you".[19]