Published on the 20/08/2026 | Written by Heather Wright

If your data doesn’t drive action, it’s a distraction…

Hoyts’ Adam Wrightson has a blunt view on corporate dashboards: If the data doesn’t change a decision, it’s just decoration – and a potentially distracting one at that.

As the cinema chain builds a broader data platform and prepares to move its core operational systems to the cloud, it is focusing less on creating more reports and more on turning information into action. That approach is already shaping everything from movie scheduling and demand forecasting to staffing and customer experience initiatives.

“If we can’t articulate the value we’re trying to create, adding AI doesn’t make the idea better.

A decade ago, the company wasn’t the market leader in customer experience, digital experience or marketshare, says Wrightson, Group IT director for Hoyts’ Cinema Technology Group. Then it made the decision to change that, investing first in reinventing the physical cinema experience with reclining seats and premium formats before applying the same kind of thinking to digital channels.

“More than five years ago we identified digital as an important battleground not only for growth, but for customer experience and our ability to differentiate Hoyts from our competitors,” Wrightson told iStart.

“If we wanted to deliver the best cinema experience in the market, that experience couldn’t begin when someone walked through our doors. It had to begin from their first interaction with Hoyts.”

The company rebuilt its website around streamlined customer journeys and developed its first native app, replacing an earlier white-labelled offering from long-standing technology partner Vista Group. Those investments helped establish digital as an increasingly important channel, but they also changed how the business thinks about technology.

Today, Wrightson says, Hoyts has reached a point where the challenge is no longer catching competitors, but staying ahead of them.

“Five years ago, our challenge was closing the gap. Today, our challenge is continuing to put daylight between Hoyts and our competitors.”

That pursuit is increasingly being driven by data.

In parallel with a migration of its Vista cinema management platform to Vista Cloud, Hoyts is developing a broader data strategy that will bring information together from multiple systems across the business. The goal isn’t to create another layer of reporting.

“The objective isn’t simply to create more reports or dashboards,” Wrightson says. “There’s a big difference between data that’s interesting and data that’s actionable. We want to put meaningful information into the hands of our people at the point where it can influence a decision, trigger an action or ultimately improve a business outcome.”

It’s a philosophy that will resonate with many organisations grappling with analytics initiatives that generate endless charts but few measurable outcomes.

Wrightson says businesses – including Hoyts – can easily create hundreds of reports and dashboards, but the real test is whether the information changes behaviour.

“If it doesn’t inform an action that enables you to do something that is going to allow you to, for example, be more efficient or generate more revenue, then effectively data can be interesting, but it can be a distraction.”

For Hoyts, actionable data has very real operational consequences.

Cinema is, in many respects, a business built on perishable inventory. Once a movie starts, any empty seats can never be sold. That makes forecasting, programming and operational decisions critical.

“If you go back 20 years, the programming used to be set for the week,” Wrightson notes.

Today the company has the ability to review performance data and alter programming based on how films are performing.

“We have the ability now through actionable insights to potentially change some of that programming on a daily basis if we choose to, because we might say one film’s not performing or that might perform better at a different time of day.”

The same thinking extends across staffing, food and beverage operations, pricing, auditorium allocation and demand forecasting. The objective is not to report on what happened last week, but to influence what happens tomorrow or even later today.

Underlying much of this is Vista, which Wrightson describes as effectively the company’s cinema ERP platform. The system support everything from movie scheduling and pricing to ticketing, concessions and point-of-sale operations. After nearly 20 years of use, Hoyts is now migrating that foundation to Vista Cloud under a six-year agreement with Vista Group.

But Wrightson is adamant the project shouldn’t be viewed as simply a traditional cloud migration.

“The measure of success isn’t that whether we’ve moved 60-plus cinemas into the cloud or switched off a collection of servers. It’s what Hoyts can do differently once we’re there.”

Part of that rationale comes down to customer behaviour.

Today, three out of every four Hoyts tickets are sold through self-service channels, with around 65 percent purchased online and a further 10 percent through self-service kiosks. During major blockbuster openings, that figure can exceed 90 percent.

That shift has created a mismatch between customer behaviour and legacy architecture.

Historically transactions ultimately connected back to servers located inside individual cinemas. The move to Vista Cloud will relocate the transactional source of truth into Microsoft Azure, closer to the digital channels where customers increasingly interact with the business.

“The cinema used to be the centre of our technology architecture because that’s where almost every transaction happened. Today the customer can transact with us anywhere, so our architecture has to evolve around the customer, rather than the building.”

Wrightson says the company is also looking to ensure it doesn’t simply recreate the past with its latest migration.

“When you’ve operated a platform for close to 20 years, you inevitably accumulate integrations, customisations, processes and workarounds. A modernisation program gives you a rare opportunity to challenge those rather than automatically rebuilding them.

“Modernisation is as much about what you choose not to take with you as what you migrate.”

Looking ahead, Wrightson believes the combination of data, AI and automation will create opportunities to further improve decision-making.

“If we can move from simply presenting someone with information to identifying an opportunity, recommending an action or even triggering an appropriate workflow, that’s where data starts to become incredibly powerful.”

But in keeping with the company’s broader approach, he has little interest in deploying technology for its own sake.

“Our approach to AI is business problem first, technology second,” he says. “If we can’t articulate the value we’re trying to create, adding AI doesn’t make the idea better.”

For Wrightson, that’s ultimately the distinction that matters. Cloud platforms, ERP systems, data lakes and dashboards are only useful if they help people make better decisions. Otherwise, they’re just another report no one acts on.

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