Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

There’s a moment in every data team’s journey when a bill arrives with unexpected costs. It might be an egress charge you didn’t see coming, a query cost that spiralled when usage spiked, or the quiet realization that migrating your data to a different platform would take months of work and a significant budget. If you’ve been there, you know what vendor lock-in really costs, and it’s not just dollars.

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.