!FEST Emotion Holding enters the IT business by creating a partner data & AI agency gloozd

July 30, 2026

reading time 10 minutes

Dmytro Herasimov

Yurii Luchka

Andriy Khudo

Today, businesses have already learned how to collect data: large chains implement loyalty systems, hire analysts, and record millions of transactions.

But the most important asset, the only one that a business can turn into solutions – the knowledge derived from this data – is possessed by only a few.

!FEST Emotion Holding (hereinafter – !FEST) faced this challenge firsthand. Over three years of work, the internal data team has gone from manual reports to a Gen AI ecosystem for the entire holding. Once this experience was accumulated, it became clear: hundreds of other Ukrainian companies face the exact same challenges.

This led to the decision to spin the team off into a separate data & AI agency, gloozd. The team's main ambition is to become synonymous with "data & AI" for Ukrainian business through sustainable partnerships.

How the idea emerged

The project emerged in 2023 as a response to the understanding that the Holding's approach to data work needed transformation. As !FEST co-founder Dmytro Herasimov notes:

"!FEST has been working with loyalty systems since the company's first year of existence, meaning for almost 20 years we have been dealing with data, segments, and consumer behavior. Our data direction was naturally born from this. However, while at first we thought that businesses just needed data, now we clearly understand: data is just a tool for identifying knowledge, based on which we form solutions and bring them to life."

To make !FEST a truly data-driven organization, the approach to data work had to be transformed into a three-level analytical ecosystem: basic BI reporting for routine use, a self-service platform on Looker where every manager builds dashboards themselves without an analyst, and an AI assistant that answers queries in natural language, draws charts, and builds personal dashboards.

The main consequence of these changes for !FEST: decentralization of data access, where every business user can independently and in real-time obtain the necessary information without waiting in line for analysts.

This success and the transformation of a small team into a full-fledged structure of data engineers, AI engineers, analysts, and sociologists prompted the department within the large Holding to spin off into an autonomous data & AI agency, gloozd.

What gloozd does

gloozd does not operate as a product company with a fixed set of tools. The team begins every project with an analysis of the business, its data, and goals, after which it builds a solution for the partner's specific request rather than a typical scenario. To confirm the quality of its solutions, the team has already managed to enter into a strategic partnership with Google Cloud Platform, which allows it to integrate the best global technologies into its ideas.

The team made a decision to build its work not around reports, but to embed the synergy of three directions into its philosophy: data organization, artificial intelligence, and sociology, which multiplies the value of each one individually.

This structure was formed:

data bureau
brings order to data and builds infrastructure.
r&d ai
creates AI solutions upon business request. The uniqueness lies in the possibility of joint development of transformative solutions.
cx analytics
uses sociological methods to find out what really lies behind customer behavior.

CEO and co-founder of gloozd Yurii Luchka explains why the team consciously builds relationships with clients as a partnership, rather than a classic "client – contractor" model:

"We feel that working with data is creativity, not bureaucracy, so we were inspired not by classical IT, but by design and creative agencies whose work brings real joy to business. We are consciously moving away from the client-contractor model to partnership – this is exactly what we are used to at !FEST, and it is this model that leads to symbiosis and mutual success."

The team has already implemented over 20 projects. Some of them:

VARUS.UA

The team integrated a smart wrapper into the site search. It is enough for the customer to write a query in natural language: for example, "pilaf for four," and the system determines the context itself and generates a list of necessary products. Already after two months, the average cost of goods in the cart turned out to be 23% higher than in regular search, and the average receipt – by 18%.

LOKAL.

For the loyalty program, which unites about two million participants, gloozd created an AI assistant for automatic audience targeting. It is enough for a manager to formulate a task in natural language – for example, find guests for a BBQ festival. The system itself forms a ready-made segment in the CRM. The preparation time for a marketing campaign was reduced from several days to less than 20 minutes.

Services for citizens as a separate direction.

A separate direction of work for gloozd is digital solutions for citizens. A veteran's AI assistant, developed by the team, is already working in the Lviv and Kherson communities and is scaling further: it helps to get information about benefits, medical services, training, and other support programs. The team is planning a large-scale development of the veteran's AI assistant – to the level of a full-fledged digital brother-in-arms, who will not only consult but also perform actions on behalf of the veteran independently and be there for every life need.

read all cases here

"This is more of a social direction for us, but it drives us. The opportunity to make our lives, the lives of our friends, parents better drives us,"

– explains Yurii Luchka about the work on services for citizens.

What next

To make oneself, the city, the country, and the world better – that is the main mission of !FEST. At gloozd, they plan to move towards this using data and common sense, while simultaneously developing a model of long-term partnership with business instead of separate short-term projects. The team says that the way to the goal is also important: not through hype or loud promises, but through solutions based on data, mathematics, and verified facts.

"We believe in data, mathematics, and expertise. We are not close to the hype around AI, fake experts, and solutions without empirics, and there is quite a lot of that on the market,"

– says the company.

Reference:

gloozd – a data & AI agency that grew out of the data team of the !FEST Emotion Holding. The company builds data infrastructure, implements AI solutions, and researches customer behavior using sociological methods, working in three directions: data bureau, R&D AI lab, and cx analytics. A certified Google Cloud partner. More details: gloozd.agency

"!FEST" Emotion Holding – a network of conceptual author's restaurants and directions, founded in Lviv in 2007 by three entrepreneurs: Andriy Khudo, Dmytro Herasymov, and Yurko Nazaruk. Now !FEST is more than a restaurant company: despite the famous concepts "Piana Vyshnia" (Drunken Cherry), "Rebernya" (Ribs House), "Lviv Coffee Manufacture", the company develops educational, development, coffee, event directions, and its own clothing brand.