Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Your analytics team built a report. It worked fine in development, but when it went into production, users began to complain about loading time. Your team has checked the database and looked at the dashboard configuration, but nobody can find the problem. There’s a good chance the cause is a cross join, and there’s an even better chance it’s executing in the wrong place.

You’ve heard the pitch: AI is going to revolutionize finance. It’s going to write your variance commentary, spot anomalies before you do, answer questions about your data in plain English, and free your team from the drudgery of month-end prep so you can focus on what actually matters: strategy, decisions, and moving the business forward. It’s easy to see why you’d believe the hype.

The plan that fits your workflow is rarely the one you land on if you shop the pricing page first.

I spend my days helping organizations modernize analytics to drive tangible business outcomes and liberate analytics teams from legacy processes. At this year’s Snowflake Summit ’26, I had the pleasure of sitting down with AJ Subbarao, Director of Business Intelligence & AI at Intuitive Surgical (ISRG).

It is Monday morning. Your strongest FP&A analyst opens their laptop and starts pulling the SAP export. They clean it in Excel, cross-reference it against last month's version, and flag the columns that have shifted format again. Tuesday they pull the Dynamics export from the German entity and begin reconciling the two. Wednesday the Polish subsidiary data has not arrived. They chase the local accountant, wait, chase again.

The goal is not complicated to describe. The CEO opens a dashboard, asks a question about regional margin for Q2, drills through to the underlying journal entries, and gets the answer in seconds, without asking anyone. No email to the controller. No waiting until Thursday. No 'let me come back to you on that.' Every CFO who has sat through a pitch for a data platform has been shown this vision. Most of them believe it is achievable. A meaningful number have actually achieved it.

The future of data analytics and AI education has just become even more accessible. The Qlik Academic Program is excited to announce a major upgrade to Qlik Product licenses available for educators and students worldwide. Participants in the program will now receive access to Premium Qlik Cloud Analytics and Premium Qlik Talend Cloud, providing an even more powerful environment for teaching, learning, and innovating with data.

Your organization invested heavily in a data warehouse, yet business users still wait days for answers to simple questions. The disconnect between where data lives and who needs it remains one of the persistent challenges in enterprise analytics. With 95% of AI pilots failing due to poor data foundations and accessibility issues, companies need a standardized way to connect AI agents to their existing data infrastructure.

Your data integration team just asked: "Should we use MCP or REST APIs?" The answer is yes to both. With the ETL market reaching $10.24 billion in 2026 and projected to grow to $21.25 billion by 2031, understanding when to leverage each technology determines whether your AI agents can autonomously adapt to changing data needs or require manual code updates for every new integration.

A year ago we announced that Databox is becoming an AI-first company. At the time, that mostly meant what it meant for many companies in 2025: AI becoming a strategic priority. Teams were encouraged to experiment and adopt new tools, as it was clear that AI wasn’t a trend we could ignore. That was the easy part. What’s become clear over the last year is that there’s a significant difference between being AI-first and being AI-native.