In the times when several traditional BI players are afraid of losing the market to generative AI, Qlik has sought to turn the tide in its favour by acquiring suitable partners and adopting new techniques and technologies. Last week, the company announced a suite of OpenAI connectors that aims to help customers seamlessly and securely bring generative AI content into Qlik to support a wide range of cloud analytics and automation use cases. 

This new offering from the company looks to deliver the power of generative AI dirently within Qlik, bringing back rich contextual content through a ChatGPT experience to enhance data and insights in Qlik applications and automations.

The company said that the general availability of Qlik’s OpenAI connectors is the first in a planned set of services and solutions that leverages its open platform approach to help customers and partners innovate and drive more use of and value from their data with generative AI. “Today, organisations are actively using predictive and classic AI and accelerating their experimentation with generative AI across use cases, including those in data analytics and decision support and automation,” said Dan Vesset, group VP of data and analytics research at IDC. 

Qlik chief strategy officer, James Fisher, said that its new OpenAI connectors has been built on its long history of enabling customers with AI, ML and NLP capabilities directly within the platform. He said that these connectors are just the first elements in its long-term strategy to help organisations enhance data and analytics capabilities with generative AI, alongside supporting their own generative AI initiatives with its portfolio of data integration, quality and governance solutions. “Customers are rightly excited about its potential to augment their analysis and processes with relevant external data,” he added. 

Recently, Qlik also showcased the potential of combining generative AI and Qlik with demonstration at QlikWorld that used ChatGPT to drive insights within Qlik Cloud. Here, they showed how generative AI complements a wide range of use cases. This includes adding external data sets to analysis, expanding content with natural language readouts, and asking questions that deliver new insights from data. 

Elaborating on the same, Varun Babbar, managing director – India & SAARC, Qlik, told AIM that through their analytics engine, customers can now directly connect to the OpenAI platform and can leverage all the power of that platform. He further added that the company is making investments in their own generative AI-based chatbot. 

“Generative AI complements a wide range of use cases from adding external data sets to analysis, expanding context with natural language readouts, and asking questions that deliver new insights from data,” he explained. 

Talend Acquisition 

In May 2023, Qlik completed its acquisition of ETL expert Talend adding new capabilities to the longtime analytics vendor’s growing data integration platform. Talend specialises in data transformation and data quality and provides a platform to the users to unify data collected from various sources. “Talend will have a huge role to play,” said Geoff Thomas, senior VP for Asia Pacific at Qlik, adding that the acquisition will help them in building a whole governed data catalog, alongside creating data pipelines and more. 

Thomas believes that the biggest challenge with every generative AI or any analytic solution is to create that ‘governing’ layer underneath. And that’s where our data integration solutions as well as the acquisition of Talend comes into the picture as it has the ability to create that layer. When asked if Qlik looks to acquire any generative AI companies in the future, Thomas said, “Right now, Qlik is happy with the latest acquisition of Talend.”  

He said that the company is not looking to acquire any generative AI startups. “But certainly, in terms of future acquisitions, there’s not really anything that I can comment on right now. As you can imagine… we’ve done several acquisitions… I think about eight acquisitions just in the past few years,” he added. Some of the companies acquired by Qlik include, Big Squid, Node Graph AB, Blendr.io, Knarr, RoxAI and others. 

Generative AI is Not New 

Qlik had ventured into ‘AI conversational analytics’ as early as in 2019, recalled Babbar. He said that the company had a chat solution, called ‘Insight Advisor’. People could go into a platform, ask a question, and get their answer. Interestingly, HDFC Life, one of the key customers of Qlik, were one of the early adopters of this technology. “They then moved from a more reactive model, where the people were going to a dashboard to find insights to a model where they integrated it within their own chat solutions,” shared Babbar. 

Besides HDFC Life, other notable customers of Qlik include TCS, NSE, and IOCL among others.

That’s not all, Qlik takes great pride in its R&D team too. Thomas said that the team comes up with something new every six weeks. He told AIM that by the end of this year, the company is looking to launch more connector capabilities, which probably would be integrated into every SaaS solution available and bring that data to the Qlik platform. 

Bets Big on India 

“India is in a great position to lead the world, to be a global leader in this whole area of data,” said Thomas. He said that the amount of data and the new use cases that are going to mushroom in the coming months will be huge. “This is going to be the real driver for the Indian economy,” he concluded.