Flash back two years ago and Scott Fischaber spent a considerable time educating potential clients about AI’s possibilities. Today, the CEO of Belfast-based Analytics Engines fields constant enquiries from organisations that understand AI’s importance but are paralysed by not knowing how to start.
"There's a lot of noise out there for people to contend with and new announcements every day," says Scott. "But once you start to talk about the kinds of projects we've actually delivered and the value they are creating, people realise we understand this space and they're in good hands."
The market is transitioning away from education and pilots and into implementation and operationalisation. Analytics Engines - founded in 2008 with nearly two decades of expertise in complex data challenges - is positioning itself in that gap and guiding customers to leverage practical, real world business value.
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"We do prior research on the organisation and see what their core proposition is," Scott says. "We tailor it each time, as every data challenge and every business's operating context is different. We have ideas, but customers know their business best, so we invite them into a process of co-design where they feel they’re struggling and where the real pain points might be."
Qubisprovides one example of progression from strategy to implementation. Following an AI workshop in January, the organisation moved through proof-of-concept work to prove technical feasibility and set the foundations for a business case and are due to launch a pilot with 10 external organisations next month. Construction group McAvoy meanwhile embarked on an “immersive strategy” engagement – where an AI Engineer is embedded with the company to deeply understand business operations before coming back with recommendations covering governance, policies, skill gaps, adoption roadmaps, and training needs.
“Often companies are really interested in going further but require assurance that everything is going to be underpinned with safety and governance," says Scott, a certified data ethics professional. “That's why we bake ethical frameworks into our methodology from the get-go.”
Alongside bespoke client solutions, Analytics Engines have developed reusable AI agents now being delivered as part of larger solutions. “What started out as virtual assistants, either stand-alone or embedded inside a business application, have expanded as the ability of these models has improved” says Scott. “Having specialised task agents for specific operations, orchestration agents to pull it all together, and QA agents to ensure quality – combined with a strong governance framework and human-in-the loop review is becoming an increasingly common pattern, so having high quality agents we can drop into these solutions is key to rapid deployment and reducing risk for our customers.”
The agents represent the middle ground between fully custom development and off-the-shelf software. They handle complex tasks - continuously scanning for research developments, automatically generating metadata for large document repositories, serving the right content to the right people - but deploy relatively quickly.
Utilising these, Analytics Engines has been working with Limerick City and County Council, DúnLaoghaire-Rathdown County Council, and Microsoft in the development of an AI-powered tool for summarising public consultation responses. The tool addresses a genuine bottleneck where planners face a statutory 12-week deadline to process and summarise each public response to planning consultations.
"In the normal course of things, this is manual, time-consuming work that requires significant planning resources,” says Scott. “The AI automates the summarisation whilst keeping planners in control - they review, edit, and confirm every output before it's finalised.”
Initial pilot phase usage suggests approximately 40% reduction in time required with more expected as it is more deeply integrated into their existing workflows. This frees teams for more complex analytical work and represents a replicable model that could be adapted across local authorities.
The firm is currently working with organisations as far afield as Australia and the USA to develop custom machine learning models for communications, IoT, and computer vision applications.
Analytics Engines is also preparing trials with universities and accessibility organisations in Europe and Latin America. The timing aligns with the European Accessibility Act that came into effect in June, creating both regulatory pressure and genuine need for organisations to ensure digital content meets accessibility standards.
“In response to the Accessibility Act, we have been able to spin up a new solution and go-to-market quickly," says Scott. “We’ve received some excellent initial feedback on the value we’re aiming to generate. We’ve seen the time taken to get MVPs into customers’ hands reduced with current technology and we are using this to quickly launch new scalable solutions when we see an opportunity”.
Big Data Belfast returns on 22 October for its eleventh year, expecting over 800 delegates with headline sponsors PwC. Greg Jackson, CEO and founder of Octopus Energy, features alongside speakers from Microsoft, Dell Technologies, AMD, Allstate, and DailyPay.
“When we started Big Data Belfast back in 2014, Northern Ireland's tech ecosystem was still taking shape," says Scott. "We've since hosted speakers from Netflix, McLaren F1, Disney+, Liverpool FC. But the real value isn't just in the marquee names - it's the collaborations that happens between sessions."
Big Data New York launched in April 2025 at Business Insider in New York City with Big Data Dublin shortly thereafter in June 2025 at Microsoft Ireland's headquarters, bringing together over 250 delegates and 30+ expert speakers. "Big Data Belfast has always been about connecting people," says Scott. "We don’t need to be the smartest people in the room - we're interested in getting the smartest people into the room together and seeing what happens when they start talking to each other."
Based on customer engagements and interactions around Big Data Belfast, Scott has developed a clear view about where organisations actually sit versus where they need to be.
"People are still dipping their toes in the water at the moment, and they're looking at maybe one or two pieces of their entire business," he says. "The winning companies in the future are going to be those that look across their businesses and try to understand how they can transform that business using AI."
Dublin-based Deanta, a leading publishing solutions provider operating in academic, STEM, legal and professional markets, is doing just that. They are reshaping their own business and envisioning a new publishing ecosystem where data is used to drive decisions and AI is harnessed throughout the process to enable seamless communication throughout the publishing workflow. The team at Analytics Engines are helping them through this process, from ideation, proof-of-concept delivery, and operationalisation of AI tools within their Lanstad production workflow platform.
READ MORE: Big Data Belfast 2025: Pioneering AI, Data Innovation & Economic Growth in Northern Ireland
As organisations move from AI awareness to AI implementation, Analytics Engines’ accumulated knowledge across a range of sectors is proving to be a key differentiator.
“The gap between where companies think they should be with AI and where they actually are remains substantial,” says Scott. “So we deliberately set out to understand intimately how a customer is operating, only then can our team come in behind a company to provide genuine guidance and direction.”
In a market still crowded with noise, that positioning - close enough to understand the anxiety around AI, and experienced enough to provide critical guidance - is proving to be Analytics Engines' competitive advantage.
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