Joel (Joey) Baruch
Chief Technology Officer & Head of AI, Commercial Diligence Practice at Alvarez & Marsal
New York City Metropolitan Area, United States
About Joel (Joey) Baruch
Joel (Joey) Baruch is Chief Technology Officer & Head of AI, Commercial Diligence Practice at Alvarez & Marsal. Location: New York City Metropolitan Area, United States.
I'm the CTO and Head of AI for Alvarez & Marsal's Commercial Due Diligence practice. CDD is the firm's newest practice, launched globally in 2026. My role is to co-build it as AI-native: a practice where AI is foundational to how we execute and deliver, not a bolt-on. I largely cover four areas: AI strategy; tech and AI product, including the roadmap and the engine that takes us from idea to working product; governance and risk in a regulated advisory business; and Agentic Resources, the change-management discipline I think of as HR for agents. We are building this from the ground up, and that's the most exciting part. The operating thesis I work from: in applied AI, context engineering is the multiplier. Models and agentic frameworks improve fast and are getting cheaper. The judgment that comes from a well-architected knowledge substrate is not. What makes an agent useful sits in the architecture of the context it operates on, not in the prompt. That belief shapes how I prioritize. It shapes how I think of everything from task delegation, through change management, to team and organizational design. Beyond the practice, I work on what an AI-native firm looks like at the corporate layer: security posture for a world where agents are both the threat model and the surface, enterprise AI vendor strategy and the relationships needed to make it successful, and the data and context infrastructure that lets a federated firm benefit from a shared substrate. Inside the practice, the work shows up as products that compress diligence cycles and raise the floor on analytical rigor. We can deliver so much more value with the same amount of resources. My superpower is velocity at the front of the funnel. I love taking ideas from whiteboard to working solutions in hours to days, where the conventional spec-to-pilot path takes weeks to months. That isn't a trick. It's what context engineering buys you when the substrate is already in place. How I got here: prior CTO of an A&M AI-native target-identification product line; co-founder CTO of HuMoov; engineering at PayPal (fraud), IBM Research (graph and NLP), Qualcomm, Wilocity. MBA from Cornell Tech, BSc in Computer Engineering from the Technion. Before all of it, IDF squadron commander.
Skills
Additional experience
Chief Technology Officer
Alvarez & Marsal
April 2021 – May 2026
Education
- MBA, Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management
- Bachelor of Science (BS), Technion - Israel Institute of Technology