Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

At Qlik Connect, one question kept coming up in conversations with leaders: “Which AI vendor should we pick?” But I think that’s the wrong starting point. The better question is: What kind of company do you want to become over the next three years? Right now, most organizations are heading down one of two paths with AI. Some are bolting it onto existing workflows to improve efficiency.

What marketing mastered years ago, product teams are only now beginning to understand. For decades, marketing has operated on a simple but powerful principle: don't make your customers come to you, go to them. Meet them on the channels they already use, speak in the language they already speak, and show up where they already spend their time. The result was omni-channel marketing, a discipline that transformed how brands engage with the world.

At Qlik Connect, one of the big messages we’re putting in front of customers is this: you’re closer to agentic AI than you think. I believe that because a lot of our customers already have more of the foundation in place than they may realize. If you have been working to improve data quality, strengthen governance, connect data across the business, and move analytics beyond reporting into real decision support, you are already building the conditions agentic AI needs to deliver value.

“The data integration landscape is currently undergoing a seismic shift. We are moving away from an era of human-led data pipelines and entering the age of Agentic Data Management.

One of the things I have learned spending time with enterprise data and analytics teams is that insight without proximity to action is only half the job. You can build a beautiful dashboard, surface a critical pattern, or flag a risk in real time, and still have the insight die on a slide before it ever changes what happens next. The gap between "we know this" and "we did something about it" is one of the most persistent problems in enterprise software.

It’s clear that we are in the early innings of an unparalleled shift in how knowledge work gets done across the board. If you pull forward the changes we’ve already seen from teams who have adopted agents in software development and apply them to broader categories of knowledge work, you can see how these patterns will lead to a fundamental rethinking of the relationship and responsibilities between humans, software, and data.

The appetite for real-time data continues to grow. Across industries, the ability to act on data as it arrives is increasingly central to how leading organizations compete, from IoT and fraud detection to event driven analytics and AI agent architectures. Streaming data is no longer a specialist workload. It is becoming a core requirement. I am excited to announce that streaming ingestion is generally available in Qlik Open Lakehouse, part of Qlik Talend Cloud.

I spend a lot of time with customers and partners, and the pattern is consistent. Everyone wants the benefits of AI, faster decisions, more automation, better productivity. But the thing that slows them down is not the model. It’s the data underneath it. Not just any data, but trusted data to drive trustworthy business outcomes. As soon as you move from AI that explains to AI that influences workflows, ambiguity stops being an inconvenience. It becomes a liability.

Just a month into the year, and a few weeks since the launch of Qlik Trends 2026, we’ve already seen just how fast the AI landscape can evolve. The emergence of Claude Cowork and Moltbook reflect the two ends of the spectrum when it comes to agent collaboration. After taking a breath to digest Dan Sommer’s fascinating webinar – check it out if you haven’t already – I’ve been reflecting on which trends are set to make the most impact this year.

Qlik’s lessons learned from developing systems in a locked-down military-grade data zone at the 2025 NDIA Hackathon In early September, developers from across the country arrive at George Mason University’s Fuse facility with laptops, notebooks, and one big unknown: how do you build a defense-grade analytics solution in just 72 hours in a simulated air-gap environment.