Focus on QCI: New Power Pack module offers ‘huge range of capabilities’

Friday, September 1, 2023 8:00 AM
Photo:  CDC Gaming
  • United States
  • Buck Wargo, CDC Gaming

Quick Custom Intelligence will unveil Power Pack – a highly configurable module within AGI53, its newest software upgrade – in October at the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas.

The QCI Enterprise Platform aligns player development, marketing and gaming in powerful real-time operational tools developed for the gaming industry. The capabilities of the QCI Enterprise Platform are core to being part of being a data empowerment company.

“Power Pack is one of the most important new features in our upcoming release due out in August,” said QCI Chief Technology Officer and co-founder Andrew Cardno. “This module is a tool that allows for interactive, action-enabled dashboards utilizing artificial general intelligence, which is called AGI. This is an incredibly empowering tool to let people understand their players and overall business and take action on their observations. AGI helps guide the user into what they should do. This is a very big step that only a year ago was not possible. This kind of technology only emerged to the world this year.”

“Power Pack solves the business problem of allowing multiple sets of data,” said Cardno. “For example, the daily operating reports from all of the different areas of the business can be put together for the finance person inside of Power Pack. It solves the challenge of providing a large range of different reports for the analysts in the business,” he added.

“For player development, it’s a comprehensive set of reports, and it also has the ability to import data. It’s a very function-rich tool set,” he said. “It has very important marketing analytic tools and algorithms built into it as well. This includes a huge, wide-ranging set of capabilities that are very customizable in the end-user experience. We’re using it for the main kinds of roles that we have in the organization, like for analytics, the daily operating report, marketing and player development.”

Cardno said the AGI53 software upgrade was constructed within 20 months of development in building the QCI Enterprise Platform, allowing the company to deliver an even more sophisticated front end.

“We have had product releases since 2022, but this is a product launch,” he said. “This version AGI53 is a realization of 20 months of development to build a product that can support all of our existing customers doing what they do in a very scalable way, and provides them with this huge range of capabilities that they need with Power Pack. Up to this point, we have been providing these new capabilities by developing specialized reports and integrations. Now, we can build specialized capabilities in a generic and manageable way inside of Power Pack, which users can do in the configurable tool as well.”

QCI serves 150 casino operators in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. In all, it works with 500 properties across the world.

The software upgrade is based on input from customers who wanted a flexible and dynamic tool to fit specific needs, Cardno said.

“They are going to see the data in a form that they consume and use effectively,” he explained. “It’s up to date, accurate, curated, and presented through options to build custom dashboards with multiple charts and graphs from areas across the business. They are going to be able to use artificial general intelligence to answer questions like ‘What are my bad games?’ and ‘Which players should I talk to today?’ There are also capabilities for actions like sending a message or kicking off an automated process.”

Large operations, for example, need the capability to deliver a complex operation such as correcting my host player coding relationship, said Cardno.

In the past, we delivered that as a customization. Today, we can deliver that as a configuration into Power Pack,” he added.

Furthermore, QCI will be unveiling a new events module and observation tools.

“AGI53 is the biggest release the company has had,” reported Cardno. “Eight figures of R&D dollars have been spent on this release. It’s taken us since the end of 2021 right through August of this year to build it. The first release we built, which was 5.1 on this journey with our customers, was a tool that allowed us to work in a distributed cloud environment. It could support all these different deployments we have in a very efficient way. Version 5.2 of the QCI Enterprise Platform came out earlier this year and was a critical thing we needed to rebuild, having taken a year to rebuild the platform to the next layer up. AGI53 uses all of that work to release an enormous volume of new capabilities. We are using the version numbers because it shows the continuity in what we’ve delivered for our customers. It’s a huge step forward focused on our current deployments.”

According to Cardno, QCI will announce a large research and development project at G2E that has been built in partnership with a tribal nation.

“It’s a huge initiative, a year in the making, and we’re excited to talk about it,” he said. “It was a completely separate parallel development process.”

Cardno said QCI has prided itself on its training. It’s built up a large number of courses and has launched an initiative called QCI College, a curriculum that allows people to start at the beginning of each area of their business and go to advanced capabilities.

“We’re getting tremendous feedback about it,” he shared. “It’s our commitment to two things – being an innovation company and a teaching company and not being a consulting business. QCI is a very big step. We are already running dozens of courses each week at QCI College.”