AI Integration · Commerce · Operations
We help operations and commerce leaders separate AI signal from noise.
Ninety percent of what's sold as AI transformation is expensive noise. We help you identify the ten percent that's real, and build the systems that ship it into production.
Who We Are
Senior practitioners each with 25–30 years spanning enterprise architecture, commerce platforms, and production systems integration. We've built on major commerce stacks (Oracle ATG, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify Plus) for clients including AT&T, Burberry, Michael Kors, and RH, and now apply that depth to the engineering work behind shipping AI into real operations.
Most AI initiatives stall because they start with the technology instead of the problem. We start with what your business actually needs, then build the shortest path to production.
Straight answers. Systems that ship. Hours reclaimed, processes automated, integrations deployed.
The Engineering Behind the Strategy.
Offerings
What We Do
Commerce strategy, data, and AI, from practitioners who've built enterprise platforms for 25 years.
AI Strategy & Assessment
A short list of AI bets worth making, and the ones to walk away from. We get there by assessing your current state honestly, against your real data and team, not a vendor pitch deck.
AI Integration & Architecture
Production AI integration: MCP servers, system connectors, OAuth flows, API work that connects LLMs to the systems your business actually runs on. Architecture that ships.
Data Strategy & Readiness
Your AI is only as good as your data. We fix the product catalogs, customer records, and order data that decide whether your AI investment pays off or becomes shelf-ware.
Commerce Strategy
Twenty-five years of selecting, building, and migrating enterprise commerce platforms. Platform advisory, replatforming, composable and MACH architecture, and vendor-neutral roadmapping — because the only platform we recommend is the one that fits your business.
Team Enablement
We succeed when you no longer need us. Pair programming, architecture reviews, prompt-engineering training, and review processes that catch AI-generated mistakes before production: your team owns what we built, long after we're gone.
Operational Automation
Automate the work that drains your team's time. Approval queues, reporting, data entry, the cross-system reconciliation that happens between your systems. AI in the loop, humans on the exceptions.
Ready to Talk Through Your Needs?
Our Team
Devon Hillard
Founder & Principal
Devon founded Black Magic Consulting with a simple thesis: the best consulting happens when deep technical expertise meets genuine strategic partnership. Before launching JBM, he co-founded Spark::red and spent over two decades architecting enterprise commerce platforms for Fortune 500 retailers and global brands.
His approach to consulting reflects hard-won experience across hundreds of engagements. Devon believes that technology decisions are business decisions, and the most impactful initiatives start with a clear understanding of what the business actually needs, not what the latest vendor pitch promises. This philosophy has made him a trusted advisor to C-suite leaders navigating the intersection of commerce, content, and customer experience.
Russell Moore
Managing Director
Russell brings a rare combination of strategic vision and technical fluency to every engagement. His background spans management consulting and hands-on technology leadership, giving him the ability to bridge the gap between boardroom strategy and engineering execution.
At JBM, Russell leads large-scale modernization engagements. He works with leadership teams to identify the structural changes, in process, technology, and culture, that produce sustainable competitive advantage. His particular expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning helps clients separate genuine opportunity from hype, building AI strategies that deliver measurable business value rather than impressive demos.
James Urbati
VP of Strategy
James works at the intersection of business strategy and technology execution. His background spans advisory, go-to-market, and operational leadership roles, giving him a grounded perspective on what it actually takes to move organizations forward.
At Black Magic Consulting, James leads strategy engagements and helps clients build the internal alignment needed to execute on their technology investments. He’s particularly focused on helping mid-market companies cut through complexity and make confident decisions about AI, commerce, and digital transformation.
Eli Jones
Project Manager
Eli’s transition from military leadership to consulting operations was natural. The skills that made him an effective Marine Corps officer (meticulous planning, clear communication under pressure, and an unwavering commitment to mission success) translate directly to managing complex enterprise engagements.
At JBM, Eli oversees program delivery and operational excellence. He designs execution frameworks that keep multi-team initiatives coordinated and accountable, identifies risks before they become blockers, and ensures that every engagement runs with the precision and discipline our clients expect. His leadership style combines high standards with genuine investment in team development, creating an environment where exceptional work is the baseline, not the exception.
Roddy Richards
VP of Development
Roddy represents the engineering excellence that distinguishes JBM’s delivery capability. While many consultancies specialize in recommendations, Roddy ensures that our strategies translate into production-quality software that performs under real-world conditions.
His cross-platform fluency is genuinely rare. Whether the engagement calls for a React-based web application, a native mobile experience, a Python data pipeline, or a Node.js microservice architecture, Roddy delivers with the same standard of craftsmanship. He believes great engineering is invisible: users should experience the value, not the complexity. That philosophy produces systems that are as maintainable as they are powerful.
Robert Gaydos
Head of Data
Robert is the technical backbone of Black Magic Consulting. His career spans the full evolution of enterprise computing, from on-premise data centers to cloud-native architectures, and he brings that breadth of experience to every platform decision and architecture review.
What sets Robert apart is his pragmatism. In a field prone to chasing the newest technology, he consistently identifies the solution that best fits the client’s actual needs, whether that means a full cloud migration or a carefully optimized enhancement to existing infrastructure. His deep expertise in Oracle database systems, cloud platforms, and enterprise integration patterns has saved clients millions in avoided missteps and accelerated time-to-value across dozens of major implementations.
Elena Rybalchenko
VP of Marketing & Growth
Elena brings a strategist’s mind and a storyteller’s instinct to every engagement. Her career spans brand marketing, product marketing, and growth strategy for enterprise technology and consumer brands, giving her a nuanced understanding of how different audiences evaluate and adopt complex offerings.
At JBM, Elena leads marketing strategy engagements and oversees the firm’s own brand positioning. She works with clients to clarify their market narrative, identify their highest-value audience segments, and build go-to-market strategies that generate measurable pipeline. Her approach is grounded in data but expressed through compelling creative, because the best marketing strategy in the world means nothing if it doesn’t resonate with the people who matter most.
Built to Ship
Process
How We Work
A four-phase engagement model that takes technology and AI initiatives from assessment through production. Full team ownership or ongoing partnership, depending on what you need.
Assessment
We go deep on your stack, your data, and your business objectives to identify where AI will actually move the needle. And where it won't.
- Length
- 3–6 weeks, fixed bid
- Delivers
- A prioritized AI opportunity roadmap, build-vs-buy evaluations, a data readiness review, and honest vendor assessments with realistic timelines.
Proof of Value
We validate the highest-impact opportunities with focused, working prototypes. Tested against your real data and real constraints.
- Length
- 2–4 weeks, scoped per opportunity
- Delivers
- A working prototype wired to your systems (M365, Dynamics, Salesforce, SharePoint) or real data samples, with guardrails and audit logging from day one. Output is a go/no-go decision, not a pilot demo.
Implementation
We design and build commerce platforms and AI-integrated systems that actually ship. Production-hardened architecture from composable storefronts to AI agent infrastructure.
- Length
- 4–8 weeks per integration, fixed bid
- Delivers
- Production MCP servers, system connectors, OAuth 2.0 On-Behalf-Of flows, Entra ID app registrations, audit logging, and deploy config — running in your tenant, under your control.
Enablement
We set your teams up to own what we built. Training, documentation, pair programming, architecture reviews. Or we stay on as a long-term technical partner. Your call.
- Length
- Retainer or capped T&M, runs alongside or after implementation
- Delivers
- Pair programming, architecture reviews, practical documentation, prompt-engineering training, and the review processes that catch AI-generated mistakes before production.
Case Studies
Proven Results
AI-Driven Investing Research Platform
A members-only platform and public Thesis Tracker that scores investment predictions against measurable data points — delivered on a single Cloudflare Worker for effectively $0/month, replacing a classical market-data pipeline that would have run $500–$5,000 per month.
Charting the Path from 20-Year Legacy Ecosystem to Composable Commerce
A global operator with 200+ locations across 20+ countries came to Black Magic with two decades of tangled on-site and cloud systems. We delivered the enterprise architecture assessment, the Phase One target design on EPCC and AWS, and the phased transformation plan their engineering teams could actually ship.
Ready to Get Started?
Insights
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