The Analytics Times

Artificial Intelligence:
Our Strategy

How we infuse AI across our business,
from our products to how we operate

Introduction

A long-time leader and innovator in the data, analytics, and AI space, Qlik is perfectly positioned to fully embrace AI — not only in our products, but also in the way we conduct business — and do so responsibly. As the rise of generative AI accelerated the requirement for organizations to modernize their data fabric, it created new opportunities for Qlik to innovate in support of our customers’ efforts in developing and implementing their AI strategies. Over the past year, we have continued to lead through new acquisitions, product
innovation, talent development, technology investments, and by establishing new systems and processes.

Pillar 1

AI Foundation

AI can’t succeed without good data: It is fully dependent on an organization’s ability to establish a trusted data foundation. This was already the case with predictive AI, but the rise of generative AI — which relies on data to function — has accelerated the need for companies to modernize their data fabric. Our point of view is that there are six principles to follow for creating AI-ready data and our
product strategy for our data integration and quality portfolio fully aligns to them:

1. Data should be diverse (coming from a wide range of resources) to remove bias in AI systems

2. Data should be timely to make accurate and informed predictions

3. Data should be accurate to ensure reliability and trustworthiness in AI

4. Data should be secure to safeguard the reputation of your AI

5. Data should be discoverable to enable use of relevant and contextual data

6. Data should be consumable for ML training and LLM integration

Our Portfolio

Our data integration portfolio has always been designed to move data from any source to any target, in real time. As these destinations will often use AI on this data, this is data integration operating in the service of AI, including generative AI. Qlik’s differentiation is our ability to take the best-in-class capabilities that we are known for (real-time data integration and transformation at scale) and make
them available for generative AI use cases.

In July 2024, we launched Qlik Talend Cloud®. This new flagship offering combines the best functionality of legacy solutions Qlik Cloud® Data Integration, Talend® Cloud, and Stitch Data, and is designed to help our customers implement a trusted data foundation for AI.

Qlik Talend Cloud is built on Qlik’s cloud infrastructure platform, with the focus on managing the data integrity of our customers’ AI, analytics, and business operational projects. It offers a unified package of data integration and quality capabilities that enable data engineers and scientists to deploy AI-augmented data pipelines that deliver trusted data wherever it’s needed. This includes:

Support for vector databases and multiple LLMs that help build data pipelines to support Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) applications
Ability to use custom SQL to transform datasets for training machine learning models
Address the trust and compliance needs of our customers in their use of AI through data lineage, impact analysis, and the ability to assess the trustworthiness of AI datasets (providing a trust score) We have provided productivity-enhancing tools (like a co-pilot) for data engineers (prompt to SQL), with more coming later this year.

We have provided productivity-enhancing tools (like a co-pilot) for data engineers (prompt to SQL), with more coming later this year.

What’s Next

For the latter part of 2024, we plan to introduce a range of dedicated components to support RAG implementations with the leading vector databases, embedding models, and LLMs. This will offer data engineers implementing AI workloads the same reliability and scalability they expect when operationalizing all their other workloads.

Looking ahead, our 2025 plan includes further enhancements through generative AI to further improve data engineer productivity, including data pipeline design tasks, dataset auto-classifications, automated workflows, and AI-assisted record deduplication.

WHO’S IT FOR

Data Engineers and Data Architects

These professionals need to ensure that data that will be used for downstream AI processes is of high quality and trustworthy. They also want to be able to deliver that data throughout their organization using AI-augmented, no-code pipelines.

Pillar 2

AI-Powered Analytics

Enriching analytical applications and workflows with AI-powered capabilities promotes enhanced, data-centric decision making and accelerates insights. While there has been much hype around generative AI over the last year, our point of view is that it isn’t the solution to everything. Instead, we believe that both predictive AI (i.e. traditional AI), which processes and returns expected results such as analyses and predictions, and generative AI, which produces newly synthesized content based on training from existing data, hold huge potential.

Therefore, our product strategy for our analytics portfolio encompasses both predictive and generative AI.

Our Portfolio

AI has always been foundational to Qlik Cloud Analytics, our flagship analytics offering. From analytics creation and data prep to data exploration — with natural language search, conversational analytics, and natural language generation — Qlik Cloud® is designed to enhance everything users do with AI.

Today, we offer a full range of AI-powered, augmented analytics capabilities that deepen insight, broaden access, and drive efficiency. This includes:

Automated insights: auto-generate a broad range of analyses in a few clicks
Natural language analytics (Insight Advisor): get answers to questions with relevant text and visualizations in ten languages
Proactive insights: proactively notifies users when AI detects important changes

What’s Next

Our product roadmap for Analytics AI is about enhancing outcomes through automation and integrated intelligence, spanning the following tenets of AI-powered analytics:

AI-assisted analytics, which provide improved ways to author and engage with business-ready content such as sheets, analysis types, reports, etc.
Generating and communicating insights, which provide a range of diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive insights automatically through annotations
Natural language assistance, which provide users assistance to engage with their data, platform, and operations through natural language

WHO’S IT FOR

Application Creators and Users

These professionals are looking to build and use AI-infused applications for more powerful data analysis to support decision making — and do it in a way that is intelligent, automated, embedded, and intuitive (hence easier to adopt).

Pillar 3

AI Deployment (Self-Service AI)

Companies today are looking to create value with AI by building and deploying AI models. But following the hype of generative AI in 2023, this year there has been a shift in focus1 from large language models, which necessitate significant investments, to smaller models that are more cost efficient, easier, and faster to build and deploy.

Qlik’s product strategy is perfectly aligned to this shift. We offer self-service AI solutions that enable companies to deliver an AI experience for advanced, specific use cases in a way that is efficient and affordable with fast time to value.

Our Portfolio

In July 2024, we launched Qlik Answers™, a plug and-play, generative AI-powered knowledge assistant. Qlik Answers is a self-service AI solution that can operate independently from other Qlik products and is sold separately.

This tool allows organizations to deploy an AI model that can deliver answers from a variety of unstructured data sources. The ability to analyze unstructured data enables Qlik to deliver unique value to our customers, as it’s commonly believed that 80% of the world’s data is unstructured2. A study that the firm ETR conducted on our behalf in April 2024 also found that while companies understood the value potential of being able to deliver insights from unstructured data, less than one-third felt their organization was well equipped to do so.

With Qlik Answers, organizations can now take advantage of an out-of-the-box, consolidated self-service solution that allows users to get personalized, relevant answers to their questions in real time with full visibility of source materials. As with all Qlik products, our customers can also be assured that their data stays private. Moreover, with Qlik Answers, users will only have access to data that is curated for a specific
use case. With multiple, domain-specific knowledge bases being accessible to assistants, organizations stay in control of what content users can access.

To help ensure a successful implementation, our pricing and packaging for Qlik Answers includes starter services delivered by our customer success organization.

Since 2021, Qlik has been offering another self-service AI solution for predictive analytics, Qlik AutoML®. Like Qlik Answers, Qlik AutoML can

be purchased separately.

Qlik AutoML provides a guided, no-code machine learning experience that empowers analytics teams to perform predictive analytics without the support of data science teams. With AutoML, users can:

Auto-generate predictive models with unlimited tuning and refinement
Select and deploy the best-performing models based on scoring and ranking
Make predictions with full explainability

Note: While AutoML runs inside of Qlik Cloud, it can also be used independent of Qlik Cloud Analytics. We have customers who use a real-time API to return predictions back to their own systems without having to access Qlik Cloud.

Finally, Qlik also offers connectors to enable its customers to integrate third-party generative AI models in their analytics apps, load scripts, and automations. Qlik Cloud customers have the option to leverage our AI Accelerator program to integrate large language models into their applications.

What’s Next

In September 2024, we introduced new enhancements to Qlik AutoML’s capabilities,
including augmented MLOps, model optimization, and analytics views, with plans
for additional upgrades through the end of the year and into 2025. Future improvements are focused on the ability to create time-aware models and the introduction of a full, end-to-end MLOps lifecycle for models developed on the platform to ensure they can be adequately monitored and governed.

Although Qlik Answers is a new product, we’ve already augmented its knowledge base and assistant capabilities, with more enhancements planned.

WHO’S IT FOR

Decision-Makers and End Users

These professionals want to leverage AI in a self-service way to get insights and answers that will help them make the best predictions and decisions for their area(s) of responsibility.

AI Advistory and Governance

In order to continue to develop innovative AI products and capabilities — and to ensure we do so with ethical integrity — we have put in place a rich ecosystem of AI expertise to help steer our strategy and direction. Above all, we are deeply committed to the responsible development and deployment of our technology in ways that earn and maintain people’s trust.

Principles for Responsible AI

We have created a set of principles guiding the responsible development and deployment of our technology, available publicly at qlik.com/Trust/AI. These principles are:

Reliability: We design our products for high performance and availability so customers can safely and securely integrate and analyze data and use it to make informed decisions.

Customer control: We believe customers should always remain in control of their data and how their data is used so we design our products with finegrain security controls, including down to the row (data) and object level.

Transparency and explainability: We design our products to make it clear when customers engage with AI. We strive to make clear the data, analysis, limitations, and/or model used to generate AI-driven answers so our customers can make informed decisions on how they use our technology

Observability: We design our products so customers can understand lineage, access, and governance of data, analytics, and AI models used to inform answers and automate tasks.

Inclusive: We believe diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging drive innovation and will continue to foster these beliefs through our product design and development.

Qlik has a process and staff in place to monitor for any upcoming legislation that would impact our business, such as new AI laws. As legislative changes occur, we assess these laws and adjust our AI compliance program accordingly.

Next Steps

For more information or enquiries about Qlik products and services, feel free to contact us below.