The Grand Prix is presented to the submission that scored highest across all the judges, which has been won in 2025 by Love Business for its submission to the Best Data Academy or Skills Development Programme category.
Love Business launched the LOVE Data Academy to ignite a company-wide data culture and shift employees from passive recipients of reports to active data users. Central to the programme is ANNIE, a custom AI agent built in Azure OpenAI designed to help beginners and aspiring analysts learn SQL, build reports, and explore data with confidence.
For this innovative and empowering model blending AI technology with inclusive learning, Love Business has been named the winner of Best Data Academy or Skills Development Programme at the 2025 DataIQ Awards.
“This submission showed incredible confidence, development, and a clear path for the future for the business and individuals working there. It is what all entries should aim to emulate.” – Judges’ comments
The Challenge
As reporting capabilities matured, demand for data across the business grew sharply. Teams wanted to explore beyond dashboards, test assumptions, and make faster decisions. This interest signalled success but also highlighted a bottleneck: the data team risked being overwhelmed by ad hoc requests.
The academy was designed to meet this challenge. Rather than simply scaling reporting, it aimed to empower staff directly, embedding skills and shifting culture.
The Solution
The LOVE Data Academy is built around two learning streams: Spark, for beginners curious about data, and Surge, for more advanced users. Each stream is supported by weekly workshops, interactive challenges, and data “cheerleaders” across departments who share wins and encourage participation.
At its core is ANNIE:
- Translates natural language into accurate SQL queries.
- Explains the logic, guiding users to ask deeper questions.
- Understands internal data structures and business rules.
- Is accessible to all staff through Teams or web.
To enable this, the data team created a simplified reporting layer on top of the real-time Azure SQL data warehouse, supported by a clear data dictionary. This ensures users learn with consistent, relevant data in plain language.
Real Impact
The programme has already delivered measurable outcomes:
- £100,000+ value generated through time savings.
- 40% reduction in ad hoc requests to the data team.
- Manual Excel processing cut from hours to instant results.
- Over 90% of participants report greater confidence with data.
Feedback reflects both empowerment and enthusiasm: from staff who never thought they could code, to apprentices who now see data as central to their roles.
Engagement is further boosted through initiatives such as Dragons’ Den-style challenges, where teams use ANNIE to pitch solutions to real business problems, with winners earning credits toward Microsoft certification.
Culture Shift
The academy has already transformed conversations across finance, collections, and commercial teams. Data is no longer the preserve of specialists and is becoming part of everyday decision-making. The data team itself has shifted from reactive reporting to enabling scalable capabilities.
What’s Next
The roadmap includes rolling out the academy to sales and marketing, expanding ANNIE into predictive modelling and storytelling, and introducing dashboard-building modules with micro-certifications.
By combining AI-driven enablement with hands-on learning, the LOVE Data Academy has shown how culture, capability, and confidence can be built together.
