I'm Nikita Gurov.
I've spent 15 years walking into businesses, understanding how they actually work, and building the technology that makes them work better.
I started my career in Moscow, working on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and GE locomotive projects. Some of the largest engineering design centres outside the United States — hundreds of highly qualified engineers, complex systems, serious precision.
Then I moved to Australia.
And I couldn't find a job.
Adelaide's engineering market didn't have much going on. No advanced product development, no aerospace work, and the locals weren't exactly rolling out the welcome mat for newcomers. I tried for months. Applied everywhere. Nothing stuck.
Eventually I got sick of the whole process and decided to do something different. I knew CAD. I knew Autodesk. I knew how to automate things. So I walked into ImagineIT Technologies — a US-based Autodesk partner — and showed them what I could do.
They picked it up immediately.
My first real project was for Grundfos Pumps Australia. They needed to migrate thousands of CAD files from an old system to Autodesk Inventor. The catch? There was no tool for this. Nobody had built one.
So I wrote one.
A VBA macro that automated the entire conversion process. For large datasets — the kind most people gave up on — it just worked. That was the moment I realised something.
When a tool doesn't exist, you build it.
I've been building ever since.
Over the next 15 years, I visited hundreds of businesses across Australia. Manufacturers, power companies, mining operations, food producers, government agencies. My job was to understand what they did, figure out where they were bleeding time, and build the automation to fix it.
700,000 files migrated for Boral — in a weekend. Three legacy systems consolidated for Origin Energy across six power plants. 375 AI tools for Inventor that didn't exist anywhere in the world. And dozens of smaller projects where the biggest impact came from the simplest change.
One that sticks with me: a team spent hours every week manually preparing illustrations for user manuals. I added one small automation to their existing release process. Now the images are just there — attached to the source files, ready to download. Nobody even thinks about it anymore.
That's the kind of work I do. Not the flashy kind. The kind that disappears into the background because it works so well you forget it's there.
Three things I bring to every conversation
I run a real business.
Modern CAD isn't a side project. I deal with cash flow, hiring, marketing, insurance, clients who don't return calls — all of it. When I talk to a business owner about their problems, I'm not theorising. I'm comparing notes.
I build things.
Not PowerPoint decks. Not strategy documents. Working systems. I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of code, managed development teams, and shipped products that real companies use every day. When someone asks "how long will this take?" or "what will it cost?" — I actually know the answer. Most advisors don't, because they've never built anything.
I understand people.
This is the part that doesn't show up on a resume, but it's probably the most important. On paper, automation and efficiency gains look great. In practice? Real people at work want to feel secure. They want to understand that you care about them, not just their processes.
I've seen politics. Sabotage. Resistance. Short-sightedness. I've been in the room when a team tried to block a project because they were afraid it would replace them. And I've been in the room when that same team — six months later — couldn't imagine going back to the old way.
That's what 15 years of walking into organisations teaches you. Not just how to build systems — how to bring people with you.
What I believe
Most businesses don't need more technology. They need someone to look at what they already have, remove the noise, and connect the pieces that matter.
The biggest mistake I see — everywhere, not just in Australia — is digital transformation driven by advisors who have never written a single line of code. They talk about AI in long words but have no practical feeling for what it takes to make things work. They don't know how long the piece of string is.
I do. Because I've been measuring pieces of string for 15 years.
I also believe the game changed recently. What used to cost $100,000 and take six months can now be built in a week. I built a system for an insurance broker — under two days — that generates tailored proposals from a website URL. That would have been science fiction three years ago. It's Tuesday afternoon now.
Most businesses don't know this yet. Their understanding of what's possible is still stuck in 2020. The gap between what AI can do and what the average business owner knows about it — that gap is enormous. And nobody is closing it for them.
That's what I'm here for.
A third of my time goes to learning
Since I finished university, I've spent roughly 30% of my working time on education. Not because someone makes me — because my clients deserve someone who actually knows what's current. Not what was current three years ago.
New tools. New platforms. New approaches. Every month something shifts. If I'm going to sit across from a business owner and say "here's what I'd do," I need to be sure that advice is grounded in what's real today.
One idea has driven everything I've done since day one: bring value to my work. Bring value to my clients.
Credentials
Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering
Authorized Autodesk Developer
Certified Autodesk Instructor (CAI)
Member of the Autodesk Developer Network
50+ completed projects across Australia and internationally
100+ engineers individually trained in FEA
Want to talk?
If any of this resonated — or if you just want to bounce something off someone who's been around the block — I'm happy to have a conversation.
60 minutes. No cost. No agenda. Just a genuine look at what's going on in your business.
Book a Conversation0493 495 529 · info@moderncad.com.au · LinkedIn