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The hard problems sit between technology, regulation, and the people you serve. That is where I work.

I'm James, a technology consultant. I help organisations put AI to work, build and fix websites and apps, get numbers they can trust, and meet privacy and accessibility rules. I work out what to do, then I build it. One person, across both.

● James Nicholson42.88° S, 147.33° EHobart, Tasmania

How I can help

The four situations I get called about most. One of them probably sounds familiar.

  1. You want AI to do real work, not just chat.

    I set AI up around your organisation: your information, your rules, and the tools your team already uses. I test that it gets things right before anyone relies on it, then show your team how to use it well.

  2. You need something built, or fixed.

    Websites, web apps, online shops, and the connections between the systems you already pay for. I build it front to back, in accounts you own, so your team (or the next developer) can run it.

  3. Your numbers don't add up.

    Your ad platforms, your analytics, and your sales figures each tell a different story (and each one is sure it is the true one). I find out what each one really records, fix what is broken, and give you reports you can make decisions from.

  4. You're not sure you're meeting the rules.

    Privacy, cookies and consent, accessibility. I check what your site really does (not only what the banner says), fix what falls short, and write it down so you have an answer when someone asks.

Who I have worked with

Some of the brands I have partnered with, directly or through their agencies. Large ones, small ones, and a few in between.

  • L'Occitane
  • Lovisa
  • Subaru
  • G8 Education
  • SkyCity
  • Caterpillar
  • Telstra
  • Loan Market
  • Sylvia P
  • Flight Centre
  • Roogenic
  • Urth
  • Thermomix
  • Homesales
  • Ray White

What I do

The same four kinds of work, this time with their technical names. In practice they arrive tangled together: a new checkout breaks the tracking, and the fixed tracking still has to respect consent. I do the strategy when the approach is unclear, and the delivery when it needs to be built.

AI orchestration and harnesses

I build the harness around an AI model: the context, tools, guard rails, and evaluations that make a general model do one organisation's specific work properly.

Then I put it into the workflows people already have, so it gets used. That might be a content tool that keeps each brand's wording out of the others, a check that runs after every bulk price change, or a coding agent your team can use safely because nothing goes live without review.

Harness. A general model knows a little about everything, which is a polite way of saying it has never met your organisation.

Fig. 1 — One request through the harness. The model alone guesses. Context says who is asking, a tool call gets the real status, the guard rails take out the address, and the eval checks the answer before anyone sees it. Diagram: a general-purpose model sits inside a harness of four parts: context, tools, guard rails, and evals. The request is "Where is order 1042?". The model alone answers "Order 1042 shipped yesterday", which is a guess. With the harness, context adds that the customer is Sam, a get_order tool call returns the real status, the guard rails remove the street address, and the eval passes the answer: "Sam, order 1042 is in transit. It arrives Thursday."

Application and web development

Front end and back end: applications, APIs, headless commerce, CMS builds, and the integrations between your CRM, your store, and your marketing platforms. If it touches the web, I have probably worked with it.

I build when building is the right answer. Sometimes an existing app, or a setting in a platform you already pay for, will do the job, and I will tell you so. When I do build, the code and the accounts are in your name, and another developer can pick it up.

An illustration of a website layout in faceted paper shapes: a header, a hero with a green button, three cards and a footer, in charcoal, grey and cream.
img · the shape of most builds · 16:10

also in Martech Integration

Handover. The arrow points away from me on purpose. Everything needed to run it goes with it.

Fig. 2 — One request, there and back. Then everything needed to run it moves to your team, and my box is left empty. Diagram: a front end sends GET /api/orders to an API, the API queries the back end, three rows come back, and the front end receives a 200. Below, the repository, docs, access, runbook and tests move from my box to your team's. My box is left empty.

Data and analytics

Measurement design, tag management, data pipelines, processing, and analysis. From deciding what to collect, through to why the ad platform, the analytics, and the CRM each report a different number.

When the tracking does not do what everyone assumed, I debug it in the browser. That often starts with opening the dataLayer and finding this:

console — window.dataLayer2 of 2
[14] { event: "purchase", id: "T-1042" }
[15] { event: "purchase", id: "T-1042" }

Fault. The reports have looked healthy for years. This is why.

Fig. 3 — One page load, as the tag manager saw it. The second page_view is struck out, and the visit counts once instead of twice. Diagram: six tags fire in sequence over one second. The last one is a duplicate page_view, so one visit was counted as two page views. The duplicate is struck out and removed, and the count goes from 2 to 1.

Compliance across digital surfaces

Privacy, consent, accessibility and data collection rules, applied to real websites and apps: the Australian Privacy Act, GDPR, US state privacy laws such as California's CCPA, the ADA, and WCAG.

I was a DPO consultant for six years, and guided organisations through GDPR. I have worked with regulators as well as with the organisations they regulate: projects with the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), GDPR in the EU and the US, CCPA enforcement by California's regulator, and federal ADA matters.

I test what the site really does: with consent declined, with a screen reader, and with only a keyboard. I fix what falls short and document it so it holds up when someone asks. Where there is legal risk, I work alongside your lawyers, not instead of them.

Check. On many sites the signal changes and the tags carry on regardless. This is the part I test.

Fig. 4 — A visitor declines. The consent signal changes, and every tag that depends on it stops. Diagram: four tags are firing. A consent update changes ad_storage and analytics_storage from granted to denied. The change reaches each downstream tag in turn, and all four stop.

Not sure which of these it is?

Most people aren't, and it's often more than one. Tell me what's going wrong, and I'll tell you honestly whether I can help.

Send me a messageBook a call

How I work

An illustration in faceted paper shapes: a laptop open on a code editor, a notebook and pen, and a steaming mug of tea with an NB tag on the tea bag.
img · the desk, mid-problem · 1:1

Strategy and delivery in one pair of hands. There is no account layer between you and the person doing the work: the person who answers your question is the person who read the code. Before I quote, I ask for access and look, because without it I am guessing (confidently, perhaps, but still guessing).

I work mostly with in-house teams, and sometimes with their agencies. I will own a repository or sit alongside your current supplier. I start with the smallest version that works, tell you when something is not worth building, and keep your accounts in your name, so no supplier can lock you in (me included).

Organisation chartYou on the left, me on the right, joined by a line. An empty dashed box sits where an account layer would be.YouMe

The account layer, shown at actual size.

Fig. 5 — the organisation chart, in full

I focus on making complex things as simple as possible. Most of the value is in reducing the problem, not adding to it.

— the working principle

Why I'm like this, and how it happened

An illustrated portrait of James Nicholson, smiling, in round tortoiseshell glasses and a white T-shirt.
img · James Nicholson · Hobart

I'm from Tasmania.1 For fifteen years my work was music: performing, composing, and arranging for ensembles including the Tasmanian Youth Orchestra, the Derwent Symphony Orchestra, and the Hobart Wind Symphony. Arranging is mostly a matter of taking something complicated and deciding what each player actually needs in front of them. That habit stayed.

1Tasmania is the island state south of mainland Australia, and Hobart is its capital. Seen from here, it is the Mainland that sits off the coast.

Eventually I needed a change (and, if I am honest, a bit of warmth), so in January 2012 I went to the Mainland for a holiday. It turned into a career. I joined one of APAC's largest Google Premier Partners as a digital marketing consultant, and that is where I started in web analytics and marketing technology. I have not stopped since.

I grew impatient with the limits of out-of-the-box marketing technology. When a platform could not do what the organisation needed, I built the missing part: integrations with custom business logic, working from first-party data. The building grew with the problems, into applications, APIs and whole sites.

About a decade ago I became fascinated by machine learning. Since then I have designed everything from simple RNNs2 to large-scale Transformers and Mixture of Experts architectures, and put machine learning into web applications. Much of my work now grew out of that: AI orchestration, building harnesses around models, and putting them into the workflows people already have.

2RNN and LSTM models were the interesting end of the field when I started. Then transformers arrived and made them look quaint, which I try not to take personally.

I started NEOBADGER in 2017 and incorporated it in 2023. I am back on the Apple Isle now, in Hobart. Some days the work is strategy, some days it is a debugger, and all of it runs on black tea.3

3No milk, no sugar. About 1,820 cups a year: five a day, with one day off for good behaviour.

Where the work goes

I live and work in Hobart. The organisations I work with are across Australia and overseas: small owner-led teams, not-for-profits, government agencies, and publicly listed companies in the US, the EU, and here in Australia.

Every map on this page puts Tasmania in the middle. That is not a design choice. It is simply where Tasmania is, if you ask anyone from here.

The arcs are not labelled. Who I work with is their business.

Where the work goes: the mainland, and overseas. No names, on purpose.

Hobart, Tasmania. Frequently left off maps, which does wonders for the privacy.

Fig. 7 — Tasmania, set in the page's own characters. # is Hobart.
A Tasmanian headland at dusk, seen from the air: grass hills falling to a calm sea under a pink and blue sky.
img · Tasmania. The view I do my thinking with.

Articles

I write things down when they take me more than an afternoon to work out. Some take several afternoons and a few pots of tea, which is why the posts run long (I have made my peace with that).

All articles

  1. SEO in an AI World: Generative SearchArtificial Intelligence
  2. DNS over TLS: The Acronym Nightmare That Protects Your PrivacyData Privacy
  3. Red Teaming: Taming Rogue AIArtificial Intelligence
  4. Are You Really Tracking That? The Art of Construct Validity for CROGoogle Analytics
  5. Introduction to Email Security: You Can’t Unsubscribe From ThisSecurity
  6. Breaking Down Australia’s Privacy Law Overhaul: What Marketers Need to KnowData Privacy

Platforms I work with

A partial list. The pattern matters more than the product (and the products rename themselves every few years anyway, usually just after I finish the documentation).

  • Google Tag Manager
  • Google Analytics 4
  • Looker Studio
  • Shopify
  • WordPress
  • Next.js
  • HubSpot
  • Salesforce
  • Zoho
  • Firebase
  • Sitecore
  • Cloudflare
  • Convex
  • Claude

Contact

Tell me what the problem is. You don't need the technical name for it: working that out is part of the job. If I am not the right person for it, I will say so. I reply myself, from Hobart, which is ahead of most of the world (by time zone, and in several other ways I am too modest to list).

Goes to James. Nobody else reads it.