The data integration, governance and analytics giant, which is holding its Qlik Connect conference this week, is emphasizing the need for trusted data as businesses and organizations look to put AI into production and generate business value.
Qlik is expanding the agentic analytics capabilities of its data analytics platform, building on the recently launched AI-powered Qlik Answers knowledge assistant with new data prediction and analytic workflow automation agents.
The data integration, data governance and business analytics giant, which is holding its annual Qlik Connect customer and partner conference in Orlando this week, also announced an extension of its agentic AI strategy to the data engineering realm and unveiled expanded data trust and governance capabilities for AI tasks.
Qlik has also struck a deal with ServiceNow to link the two vendors’ software in a bid to improve the quality of the data and analytics flowing into ServiceNow’s AI-driven workflows.
[Related: Qlik CEO: “Trusted Data Foundation” For AI Is The Theme At This Week’s Connect Event]
“Is it real? Can I trust it? Can you prove it? How much is this going to cost me to scale?” said Qlik CEO Mike Capone, as he began his Connect keynote Tuesday (pictured) by reciting the questions he frequently gets about AI from customers.
“There’s so much noise out there, so much hype, so many buzzwords,” the CEO said of the state of AI today. “I spend a lot of time meeting with executives, CEOs, CIOs, CFOs, of our customers. And one thing is becoming really, really clear right now: There’s frustration. There’s a lot of frustration out there. Why? Because companies are spending a lot of money on AI, but they are not getting the return. They’re not getting the value.”
“The reckoning is here,” he said.
Capone also repeated a theme he introduced to hundreds of channel partner executives during a Connect Partner Summit on Monday that customers are looking to “trusted partners,” including Qlik and its ecosystem of solution providers, service providers and consultants, to help them navigate their AI journey.
“You are closer to agentic AI than you think,” Capone said, telling the thousands of attendees that they can leverage the Qlik platform they already work with to overcome the problems of data availability, data quality and data governance that sink many AI projects.
In February Qlik announced the general availability of Qlik Answers, the company’s AI-powered analytical assistant that’s delivered through the Qlik Cloud platform. At Connect this week Capone said more than 1,000 customers have activated Qlik Answers and are now working with the vendor’s analytic agent capabilities.
Also in February, the company announced the availability of the Qlik Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that enables third-party assistants, such as Anthropic Claude, to securely access Qlik’s analytical capabilities and trusted data products. That was followed in March by the launch of Discovery Agent, which monitors key data areas for important data changes and possible anomalies and alerts users for possible investigation.
New AI Agent Details
At Connect this week Qlik expanded its agent portfolio with Predict Agent and Automate Agent.
Predict Agent, slated for availability later this quarter, lets users ask forward-looking questions. The agent builds machine learning models, generates predictions, and interprets results.
Automate Agent provides a link from analytics to execution that makes it possible—using natural language prompts—for data teams to trigger workflows based on analytic results.
The company also announced an expansion of its AI agent strategy beyond analytics to include data engineering, a move that brings agentic capabilities to data teams who manage and maintain data and build pipelines for moving data for analytical and AI tasks. Qlik said the new strategy centers on engineering execution for declarative pipelines, real-time data routing, data lakehouse streaming and other chores that the company said reduce friction in how data pipelines are built, altered and operated.
Qlik said its Analytics Agent technology now supports analytics software development tasks, in addition to generating analytical insights. And the company announced an expansion of its trust and governance capabilities for AI, centered on data products (curated, reusable, data sets) and the operational controls required to make them reliable for human decision making and for AI-driven actions.
Many AI products on the market today operate as a black box, said Igor Alcantara, director of data science at Qlik consulting partner IPC Global, during a panel session at the Qlik Partner Summit.
“You have no idea of the reasoning behind the results, you have no idea of how the AI delivered the results.” But Qlik’s AI technology, he said, “is a glass box” where the reasoning, the source data and other elements of the AI output are transparent. “So before making a decision, you don’t have to blindly trust the AI,” he said.
And Alcantara praised the effectiveness of the Qlik Associative Engine that powers its data analysis platform and Qlik’s data governance capabilities that he said also help build trust in the results produced by Qlik’s AI products.
ServiceNow Partnership
On Monday, as Connect got underway, Qlik announced a strategic alliance with ServiceNow through which Qlik technology, including the Qlik Analytics Engine, will be integrated with the ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric to improve the quality of the data used by the ServiceNow platform and its Ai agents.
Capone said the ServiceNow relationship provides “a better path from insight to action.”
“The marriage of what we bring: data integration, data quality, data governance, integrated with ServiceNow, helping them marry their data together with data from other sources, with our data quality and data governance frameworks, is going to be one of those, one-plus-one-equals-three-types of scenarios,” the Qlik CEO said in an interview with CRN prior to Connect.
New Qlik data collectors for the ServiceNow Data Catalog will improve visibility into data lineage, movement and structure, according to the two companies. The Qlik Analytics Engine and Qlik AI, meanwhile, can combine ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric with broader enterprise signals to surface relationships, patterns and recommendations that support more intelligent actions.
“The decisions people and agents make every day are only as good as the data behind them,” said Pramod Mahadevan, ServiceNow vice president, data and analytics product ecosystem, in a statement.
“Our partnership with Qlik connects those insights from third-party data directly inside ServiceNow, extending the reach of Workflow Data Fabric to the systems where critical data already lives. The result: People and agents that act on trusted, governed intelligence, and decision-ready data in the workflows where work gets done,” Mahadevan said.
