About
A practice built by someone still doing the job.
George Estrada is the founder and principal of Orion Digital Services. The practice works with financial services organizations, startups, mid-sized firms, and growing businesses on strategy, AI programs, and the harder problem underneath both: getting people to actually adopt what gets built.
He also serves as Chief Technology & Innovation Officer of a $1.5 billion financial institution, leading infrastructure and security, experience engineering, and artificial and business intelligence. That work covers both ends of the job: the unglamorous remediation nobody presents at a conference, and the architecture decisions that determine whether the next product costs more to ship than the last one or less.
His view of AI starts from a claim most programs get wrong — training, adoption, and security are one program, not three. They fail separately because they are measured separately. Before moving in-house he spent five years at AWS as an executive advisor to C-suites and boards, on a conviction that still shapes the consulting work: executives do not need to become technologists, they need to know which questions to ask of their technology teams and their vendors.
How the work is done
- 01Unwavering IntegrityVendor claims are a hypothesis until tested against your data, your regulator, and your people. The recommendation does not change because of who is in the room.
- 02Relentless ExcellenceEvery recommendation should still read as right to an examiner, a board member, or you in two years.
- 03Thoughtful PartnershipTechnology, process, and incentive are coupled. Moving one and expecting the others to follow is the costliest mistake in this work.
The bench
Orion is more than its founder. Specialists are brought in by discipline and assembled against the outcome you are driving to, not kept on a roster to be justified.