Qlik debuts new agentic capabilities, aiming to enhance AI trust and transparency

Data integration and analytics heavyweight QlikTech International AB took the wraps off a number of new agentic artificial intelligence capabilities today as it opened the doors to its annual customer conference in Orlando.

The updates include new AI agents for predictions and automations, enhancements to its existing portfolio of AI agents, and also a new strategic partnership with ServiceNow Inc. that will see Qlik integrate its offerings within the Workflow Data Fabric.

During his keynote presentation at today’s event, Qlik Chief Executive Mike Capone (pictured) said that many enterprise customers he has spoken to are coming close to facing an “AI reckoning” as they struggle to derive any value from their agentic AI investments. “I spend a lot of time meeting with executives, the CEOs, CIOs and CFOs of our customers,” he said. “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.”

Capone argues that the reason for these struggles is a lack of trust and the enormous “noise” around the AI industry. To that end, Qlik is looking to tackle three problems at once: data quality, governance and the “black box” problem of AI transparency. According to Capone, too many AI tools attempt to provide answers without explaining how or why they came to those decisions, creating a “crisis of confidence” among enterprise decision-makers.

To bridge this trust gap, Qlik is expanding its family of AI agents to include a new Predict Agent, which will launch later this quarter. Users will be able to ask forward-looking business questions in their natural language, and it will automatically build an appropriate machine learning model, generate a forecast and interpret the results so users can understand the thinking behind its predictions.

Alongside this is a new Automate Agent, which enables data teams to go further and use natural language prompts to trigger complex workflows based on the results of the Predict Agent’s analyses. For instance, if the Predict Agent forecasts a supply chain problem, the Automate Agent can automatically create a new procurement workflow in an external system to try and find an alternative supplier.

The company is also expanding agentic automation into data engineering, with new capabilities for “declarative pipelines” and real-time data routing. These are designed to eliminate the friction faced by data teams when they’re building and maintaining data pipelines that feed into AI systems, ensuring that whatever information is being fed to them is fresh and governed.

Those capabilities will be enhanced by Qlik’s strategic alliance with ServiceNow, which will see the Qlik Analytics Engine integrated with the Workflow Data Fabric platform. The goal is to improve the quality of the data used by ServiceNow’s own AI agents.

The partnership with ServiceNow will provide “a better path from insight to action,” Capone said. It also introduces new Qlik data connectors for the ServiceNow Data Catalog, which will enhance visibility into data lineage, movement and structure, Capone said. By integrating Qlik Data Analytics Engine and Qlik AI with ServiceNow’s Workflow Data Fabric, users will be able to glean new insights into business relationships and patterns, and surface recommendations that support more intelligent actions.

Pramod Mahadevan, ServiceNow’s vice president of data and analytics product ecosystem, said humans and AI agents are similar in that the decisions they make are only as good as the data that informs them. “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,” he said. “The result: People and agents that act on trusted, governed intelligence, and decision-ready data in the workflows where work gets done.”

Qlik Chief Strategy Officer James Fisher appeared on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during its coverage of Qlik Connect, where he discussed the problems with AI governance in more depth:

Photo: SiliconANGLE