Illinois (IL), United States
AI development for Chicago teams, on your working day
An AI development agency, one desk, Vancouver, British Columbia. For Chicago that means a remote engagement with an unusually generous overlap - 6 hours a day - and no story about a local presence that does not exist.
- base
- vancouver, bc, canada (UTC-08:00)
- market
- Chicago, United States
- your clock
- UTC-06:00 (America/Chicago)
- overlap
- 6 hours a day, 09:00-15:00 in Vancouver
- presence
- remote only, no office in Chicago
6 hours of your day, every working day
Chicago runs 2 hours ahead of Vancouver. On a normal working day the two calendars overlap from 09:00 to 15:00 Vancouver time, which is 11:00 to 17:00 where you are.
A window that size means questions get answered while they still matter. Nobody sits on a blocker overnight, and a bad assumption gets caught in the hour it was made rather than in the following sprint.
The parts that still get written down are written down anyway: acceptance criteria, the decision log, and what changed in each weekly increment. A shared clock is not an excuse for an undocumented project.
What Chicago buyers usually bring us
The record for Chicago lists two industries. Here is the part of each one that turns into an engagement, and the service line it lands under.
commodities trading
Position data, counterparty terms and market news arrive on different clocks, and the product is the one that timestamps every input it acted on.
Acceptance criteria are fixed before each weekly increment, which turns "is it working" into a question with a yes or a no.
Closest service line: AI products, built end to end
logistics
Carrier APIs, warehouse systems and customer portals all break differently under load, which is why the integration work is the project.
Business rules become typed tools with explicit contracts, because a rule that lives in a prompt is a rule that drifts.
Closest service line: Forward-deployed engineering
Contracts, currency and where the data sits
Invoices are in US dollars. A US buyer engaging a Canadian company is routine, and the form your accounts team will ask for is a W-8BEN-E, which we have ready before the first invoice.
Beyond that, the shape of an engagement does not change with distance: a scoping call, a thin end-to-end slice, then weekly increments against acceptance criteria fixed in advance. If we are not the right shop for Chicago work, you get told that in the first reply rather than after a proposal.
The five lines we sell
Same five lines everywhere, Chicago included. Most engagements are one of them, sometimes two.
- AI products, built end to end
- Knowledge bases and retrieval
- Codebase and team optimization
- Training and enablement
- Forward-deployed engineering
The languages, models and infrastructure underneath all five are listed on the Magic Ship stack page, with what each one is good for and where it is the wrong choice.
Other markets in United States
Same treatment, different clocks, and in some cases a different answer.
Start a project
Send the problem rather than a job spec. You get an answer on scope, timeline and whether we are the right shop, written by the person who would do the work.