Forward-deployed AI for business teams
Your strategy is ready. IT's backlog isn't.
Magma embeds a senior AI engineer with your strategy, marketing, and research teams: the business side of the house, turning intent that is not yet a specification into systems running inside your stack. The industry standardized the name for this in 2025: forward-deployed engineering. We have been doing the work since 2014.
Delivered with IT kept close: their governance, their stack, their sign-off.
See how we think before you talk to us
We put the reasoning behind our work in the open. Each Magma field guide takes one discipline we practice and explains it in plain language, including where the popular answer is wrong, so you can weigh the substance for yourself and decide whether a conversation is even useful, on your own timeline.
See what's coming. Build what's needed.
Two halves of the same job: sense the shift early, then ship what it calls for. Magma does both.
See what's coming: Strategic Foresight
A Competitive Horizon Scan: a cited, dated, six-lens read on the shifts coming at your market, competitors, entrants, substitutes, and customer pain, so your team can adjust positioning and place its bets early. The same evidence-graded method, applied to your market instead of your codebase.
Build what's needed: Forward-Deployed AI Engineering
A senior AI engineer embedded with your strategy, marketing, or research team: sprint to an operating map and ROI matrix, see a working prototype that fixes scope in the room, then embed until the system is working inside your own stack.
You should not have to write technical requirements
Seventeen years ago a marketing director told us the truest thing anyone has said about requirements: "Show me what you have and I'll tell you what I want." That is still how real requirements surface on the business side of the house. So we build the artifact that does the eliciting: a working prototype your team reacts to, instead of a specification no one could have written up front.
Fresh Perspective in Action
"I'd like to highlight Daniel's 'superpower' - his ability to bridge the conversations between the 'business' and 'IT'. In fact I described him then as a 'unicorn' and he remains one of the few IT professionals I've worked with who have an uncanny ability to translate business needs, shield us from the complexity of the back end and work to provide solutions that benefit all stakeholders. His natural curiosity, excellent communication skills and solutions orientation sets him apart."
Nicole FrancisDirector, Sales Enablement, Softchoice"Daniel brought exceptional technical expertise and enthusiasm to our team at Siemens. He simplified complex architectures, mentored colleagues, and consistently delivered solutions that balanced innovation with practical business needs. Any team would be fortunate to have someone with Daniel's knowledge, problem-solving abilities, and positive energy."
Patrick BevakSoftware Engineering Manager, Siemens Digital Industries Software"I feel incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to work with Daniel. Not to get too sappy, but a lot of young professionals don't get the chance to work with experienced seniors who are as patient and willing to teach as he is. I can't thank him enough for his guidance and support, which have helped me grow so much in my career. Daniel, you've made a lasting impact, and I appreciate everything you've done!"
Donavan MerrinGoogle Delivery Senior Analyst, Accenture
Delivered through Google Cloud PSO, Quantiphi, Intuitive.ai, and Ciklum. Led by Daniel Zivkovic, delivering production systems since 1996.
Google Professional Services caliber, Canadian pricing. AI foresight for what's next.
Who We Work With
Strategy, Marketing and Research leaders
You can see what AI should do for your function. What you cannot get is engineering that understands you. That translation gap is our specialty: senior technical depth with an ear for the business, since 2014.
Companies where the business feels unheard by IT
When every request becomes a ticket and every ticket becomes a quarter, momentum dies. We work for the business side, with IT kept close: their governance, their stack, their sign-off - your velocity.
Consulting and professional-services firms
You win the strategy work; don't watch a vendor capture the build. Magma adds forward-deployed AI delivery to your bench: co-delivery or fully behind the scenes, under your paper, your NDAs, your brand. Your client is never our lead: no direct sales, no poaching, in writing. It is how we already work: our enterprise delivery history runs through consulting partners.
The Magma Process
Our process follows the Design Council's Double Diamond: diverge to explore, then converge to decide, twice. Most AI consultants work only the first diamond, understanding the problem and prototyping. Very few cross all the way to production delivery, and that is where AI initiatives die. We run both diamonds. And because real requirements surface by reaction, not specification, the middle of the process is a working prototype your team responds to.
Discover
We listen first: talk to your users, watch your workflows, learn your real constraints. Not what you assume the problem is, what it actually is. Empathy does its work here, widening the view before we narrow it.
Define
We converge the discovery into the right problem to solve, framed before anything gets built. This step is getting larger, not smaller, as AI accelerates everything downstream.
Develop
We open up again: map and prototype the full spectrum of solutions, from minimum viable to optimal, so you can see and choose. Then build, with AI assistance and human judgment at every decision point.
Deliver
Production-grade, not demo-grade. Security, governance, observability, and cost optimization built in, not bolted on after launch. Google has thousands of engineers to take prototypes to production. Your company does not. That is why the Magma Process includes Develop and Deliver.
Our Competitive Edge: CodeGnosis
The Magma Process is built to create clarity before production scope is fixed. CodeGnosis - our proprietary code intelligence tool - indexes your entire codebase and makes business logic searchable by concept, not keyword.
The first two weeks of most consulting engagements are archaeology: "Where does product expiration happen?" requires tracing SQL scripts, Java services, batch jobs across dozens of repositories with zero documentation. With CodeGnosis, that question gets answered in seconds.
ThoughtWorks built the same approach (CodeConcise) for internal use only. We've productized it for air-gapped deployment - running entirely on your infrastructure, no cloud dependencies.
This is why our Forward Deployed AI Engineering engagements move faster. Your team doesn't search for code. They understand it.
Results That Speak for Themselves
Breaking Industry Patterns
Community
Founder of Serverless Toronto - 5,000+ members, 8 years connecting the dots between AI, data, and cloud.
Our recent meetup trilogy explored the full AI lifecycle: from AI-assisted coding tools, to securing AI-generated code, to the question that matters most: "Will your idea fly?" The full spectrum - from validating what to build, through secure implementation, to production-grade operations - is where the real work lives.
Credentials
Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer | Professional Cloud Architect | Gen AI L400 Advanced | OWASP Top 10 for GenAI | AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Security
Government of Canada Secret (Level II) Security Clearance
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does this cost?+
Our entry point is the AI Readiness Check at $3,500 - a 90-minute working session plus a brief your team can act on, with 100% of the fee credited toward any follow-on engagement. The full ladder, from the two-week AI Discovery Sprint (from $15,000 USD) to embedded delivery, is on the Forward-Deployed AI page, with the same numbers we would quote on a call.
Will our IT team be okay with this?+
It is designed for that. We work inside IT's governance: their stack, their security review, their sign-off. Nothing ships around them, and autonomy ramps in shadow mode until the evidence earns it. We arrive with an audit trail, not a shadow system: IT gets a governed system to review, not one to unwind.
Do you only do build and delivery, or strategy too?+
Both. Alongside the build work, Magma offers Strategic Foresight: a cited, dated, six-lens read on the shifts coming at your market, competitors, entrants, substitutes, and customer pain, so your team can adjust positioning and place its bets early. Same evidence-graded method, applied to your market instead of your codebase.
What if I just want to talk first?+
Book a 30-minute scoping call. No pitch. Bring your messiest AI question and I'll give you a straight answer. If there's a fit, I'll tell you. If there isn't, I'll point you in the right direction.
What's Been Stuck Too Long in Your Function?
Whether it's an AI initiative that lost direction, a workflow your team knows is automatable, or a business need that nobody has translated into a working system - let's find out if we're a fit.
30 minutes. No pitch. Bring your messiest AI question. I'll give you a straight answer.
Want to see it before you talk?
Two capabilities, one practice. Start with whichever question is more pressing.