About our Artificial Intelligence practice

A small, focused team that has been building production ML systems since 2019. Here is who we are and how we got here.

How we started

In early 2019, our founder Ciara Donnelly was working as a data engineer at a Belfast logistics company. She kept seeing the same pattern: teams collected mountains of data, stored it carefully, then never used it for anything beyond monthly spreadsheets. The gap between what the data could reveal and what anyone actually did with it frustrated her enough to quit and start Ai Excel Tech.

The first project was a demand-forecasting model for a food distributor in Lisburn. It took eight weeks and reduced their weekly over-ordering by 14%. That single result brought two referrals, and by the end of 2019 we had three clients and a second engineer.

Today the company has grown to nine people. We still operate from Church Lane in South Friesen Green, though half the team works remotely across Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Our client list includes manufacturers, retailers, logistics firms and a handful of professional-services companies.

Inside the Ai Excel Tech office in South Friesen Green

What we care about

Four principles that shape every decision, from which projects we take on to how we write code.

Honesty about fit

If your problem is better solved with a simple SQL query or a rules engine, we will tell you. We have turned down projects where AI would have added cost without adding value. That saves everyone time.

Ownership of outcomes

A model that sits in a notebook is a hobby project. We deploy to production, wire up monitoring, and stay accountable for accuracy after launch. If predictions drift, we fix them before you notice.

Plain language

Our reports use words your operations manager can read. We explain precision, recall and F1 scores when asked, but the default output is "here is what the model does, here is how often it is right, here is what to do when it is wrong."

Data privacy by design

We process client data on UK-hosted infrastructure. Personal identifiers are stripped or pseudonymised at the earliest possible stage. Every project has a data-handling agreement signed before we receive a single file.

The team

Nine people, four disciplines: data engineering, machine learning, software development and client delivery.

Ciara Donnelly, founder and lead data scientist

Ciara Donnelly

Founder and lead data scientist. Eight years in data engineering and ML. Formerly at Kainos and a Belfast logistics firm. Leads model design and client strategy.

Rory McAllister, senior ML engineer

Rory McAllister

Senior ML engineer. Specialises in computer vision and edge deployment. Built quality-inspection systems for two manufacturing clients. Joined in 2020.

Priya Sharma, data engineer

Priya Sharma

Data engineer. Designs the pipelines that move raw data into training-ready formats. Background in cloud infrastructure at AWS. Handles our GCP and Azure deployments too.

Declan Harte, project delivery lead

Declan Harte

Project delivery lead. Manages timelines, budgets and client communication. Keeps engineers focused and clients informed. Ten years in IT project management before joining us in 2021.

Five more engineers and analysts work behind the scenes. We keep the team small on purpose: everyone knows every project, and you will never be handed off to someone who has not read the brief.

Key milestones

A short history of where we have been.

March 2019

Ciara registers Ai Excel Tech as a limited company in Northern Ireland. First office: a shared desk in a co-working space in Belfast.

September 2019

Deliver the Lisburn food-distributor forecasting model. Over-ordering drops 14% in the first quarter of use.

January 2020

Rory joins as the second engineer. We move into a small office on Church Lane in South Friesen Green.

June 2021

Team grows to five. We sign our first retainer client, a retail chain with 40 stores needing weekly demand predictions.

February 2023

Launch our NLP practice after building a contract-review pipeline for a Belfast law firm. The system reads 200-page contracts in under four minutes.

October 2024

Team reaches nine people. Cumulative projects delivered: 38. Longest-running client relationship: five years and counting.

Ready to talk?

Whether you have a clear project in mind or just want to explore what AI could do for your business, we are happy to have a no-obligation conversation.

Contact us

Or call +44 1260 230130 during office hours (Mon to Fri, 9 am to 5.30 pm).