Qlik Launches Cloud Data Lakehouse, AI Agentic Capabilities

At this week’s Qlik Connect 2025 event the analytics, data integration and AI tech company expanded its product portfolio with an eye to providing partners and customers with more effective ways to prepare data for AI tasks and build analytical insights and AI outcomes into business workflows.

Qlik has expanded its portfolio of data integration, management and analytics offerings, unveiling this week a fully managed data lakehouse service based on the Apache Iceberg standard that the company says offers faster query performance and lower infrastructure costs to meet the demands of enterprise-scale AI and data analytics tasks.

The Qlik Open Lakehouse topped the list of new products and technologies unveiled at the company’s Qlik Connect 2025 conference this week in Orlando. The company also debuted new advanced agentic AI capabilities for the Qlik Cloud platform and new embedded AI functionality in its Qlik Cloud Analytics service.

The new software and services are intended to help bridge what Qlik CEO Mike Capone (pictured) calls “the AI activation gap” by helping businesses and organizations more effectively collect and prepare data for AI and data analytics workloads and build workflows that act on AI results and analytical insights.

“There's a lot of hype around AI. A year and a half ago everybody was talking about this sea change that was going to happen,” Capone said in an interview with CRN prior to Qlik Connect. “But look, let's face it, most companies haven't really realized much of a return on their AI investments to date. A lot of companies are experiencing significant costs associated with their AI investments. And there's actually a reset going on right now.”

“And so our view is, we're here to help you get the value out of AI. And our technology does that by really getting the data harnessed and ready for AI with our data integration platform. Then our technology allows you to get insights from analytics and AI. But then, more importantly, take action, activate your insights, put them into the workflow, into the day-to-day lives of everybody who's using it, and do that all at scale in real time,” Capone said.

Qlik Open Lakehouse is a fully managed data lakehouse system, built into the Qlik Talend Cloud, that delivers real-time data ingestion at enterprise scale (millions of records per second) from hundreds of sources. Qlik says the lakehouse provides 2.5x-to-5x faster query performance and up to 50 percent lower data storage infrastructure costs.

Open Lakehouse is based on Apache Iceberg – an open-source, high-performance data table format designed for large-scale datasets within data lakes. That provides the data lakehouse with fully automated optimization capabilities including data compaction, clustering and pruning. The lakehouse also supports a number of Iceberg-compatible data processing engines including Snowflake, Amazon Athena, Apache Spark, Trino and SageMaker.

Qlik Open Lakehouse is currently available in private preview and is scheduled to be generally available in July.

AI Agents of Change

Qlik also announced what it called an AI “agentic experience” across the Qlik Cloud – including the company’s data integration, data quality and analytics software – that will use AI agents to provide a single, conversational interface for business users to interact with data, uncover insights and take action based on analytical results.

At Qlik Connect the company debuted a discovery agent that the company said proactively identifies critical risks and opportunities across applications and datasets, presenting insights and recommended actions. A new pipeline agent, demonstrated as a concept, will allow users to describe desired business outcomes conversationally, prompting automated recommendations and the design of necessary pipelines.

Qlik initially introduced AI agents last year with Qlik Answers, a generative AI knowledge assistant tool for discovering and finding useful insights within unstructured data. The company plans to begin rolling out the new agentic AI capabilities this summer, starting with private previews.

“What we are doing is we're building out a much more robust framework to configure these agents and to make sure that once customers decide on what actions they want to take, based on insights from AI, they'll be able to execute those workflows very, very easily. So it'll really be a next generation of agentic AI for us,” CEO Capone said.

Qlik also announced plans to embed new AI capabilities within its Qlik Cloud Analytics service. A move the company said will provide a new layer of intelligence across the platform. The company said the new functionality will help prepare data faster, forecast complex trends, detect anomalies, and help take immediate action through embedded decision workflows.

The AI capabilities will include the new discovery agent as well as Qlik Predict (the renamed Qlik AutoML) and Qlik Automate (previously Qlik Application Automation).

Capone said the Qlik platform, including the new offerings unveiled at Qlik Connect, position the company to meet the needs of today’s AI and data analysis systems.

“When I got here in 2018, this is what we wanted to build. We saw this AI revolution coming, but we knew that without quality data and without an integrated platform, it was going to be really hard to achieve the value of AI. So the 14 acquisitions we've done, the close to a billion dollars in R&D [research and development] that we put into this, is really to get us to this moment – a full data analytics platform, from data integration [and] quality governance, all the way through analytics, AI and automation. That's what we built.”

The Partner Opportunity

Capone said all this presents opportunities for Qlik’s channel partners.

“Customers are overwhelmed with the promise of AI [and their] inability to actually deliver value with AI. And more and more, they're looking to their partners and our partners to give them an outcome,” he said.

Capone said that at Qlik Connect the company focused on demonstrating to partners “how our platform and our capabilities can actually be a real enabler for them to actually provide outcomes for their customers.” Qlik also aimed to show partners how the company has heavily invested in partner enablement and incentives, “to get [partners] up to speed on our technology and bring that to the market faster, because partners always have been and will continue to be a force multiplier for us.”

In an interview with CRN, David Zember, Qlik senior vice president of worldwide channels and alliances, echoed Capone’s comments about what Qlik’s latest technology offerings mean for partners.

“There's a ton of opportunity to help customers get their hands around their data and build a great data strategy,” Zember said. He specifically cited the opportunities for systems integrators and implementors around large-scale IT modernization projects – especially for partners with vertical industry domain expertise.

They can help customers extract data from out of these big systems of record [such as SAP applications] and get value out of them and get ready to use that data to build great AI experiences for their customers and employees,” Zember said. “The value comes from the business outcome.”

Qlik acquired data integration platform developer Talend in May 2023 and the company has worked since them to unite the two companies’ partner programs, Zember said.

“We took that opportunity to basically transform our partner experience, which included a new learning portal and the new partner hub … making sure we've got a program that’s simple and predictable and profitable for the partners,” Zember said. The work also included introducing Qlik partners to the Talend product portfolio and Talend partners to Qlik’s products.

“We're seeing the fruit of all of that work now, as partners adopt the platform end to end, they're able now to deliver more services. They derive more services revenue from a platform that starts with data, all that ingestion, transformation and quality and trust and data products, all the way through to AI agentic experiences,” Zember said.