Qlik CEO: ‘Trusted Data Foundation’ For AI Is The Theme At This Week’s Connect Event

Data integration, data quality and analytics tech heavyweight Qlik is holding its Qlik Connect customer and partner event in Orlando this week and CEO Mike Capone spoke with CRN in advance of the conference about the importance of trusted data for AI and his perspective on why many AI initiatives fail to generate an ROI.

As a leading provider of data integration, data governance and data quality management technology, Qlik is playing a major role in the wave of AI applications and AI agents that businesses and organizations are rapidly developing and implementing.

This week Qlik is holding its annual Qlik Connect customer and partner conference in Orlando and attendees can expect a recurring theme: Effective AI requires trusted data and the Qlik platform is the way to achieve that.

“When you think about agentic AI, who’s better positioned than us?” said Qlik CEO Mike Capone in a pre-Connect interview with CRN. “Because what you need for agentic AI, you need trusted data that’s harnessed from across your entire enterprise to be able to make smart decisions, because, ultimately, you’re going to automate those decisions, so they darn well better be right.”

The following is an interview CRN conducted with Capone (shown above delivering his Qlik Connect 2025 keynote) last week in which the CEO touched on the rapidly evolving AI landscape, including what’s preventing many companies from moving from successful proof-of-concept AI trials to implementing and scaling full-production AI systems that generates real ROI.

Capone also touched on some of the announcements Qlik is making at the Connect event, including a new alliance with ServiceNow announced Monday morning. And he commented on the recent change in Qlik’s channel management with the January departure of channel chief David Zember and the hire last month of Michael Gray as senior vice president, global channels and alliances.

The following Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity

Last week Qlik put out a press release about organizations expanding their use of agentic analysis, including Qlik Discovery Agent, as they bring AI-driven decision workflows into production. Talk about that.

This whole [Qlik Connect] conference, the whole theme that you’re going to see, is taking what has been a lot of talk of the potential of AI and actually turning it into the reality of creating value through AI. We have a long-standing history at Qlik of being able to synthesize data from across your entire enterprise and bringing it into an analytics platform that makes sense of it and provides insights that nobody else can find.

And now, quite frankly, when you think about agentic AI, who’s better positioned than us, right? Because what you need for agentic AI, you need trusted data that’s harnessed from across your entire enterprise to be able to make smart decisions, because, ultimately, you’re going to automate those decisions, so they darn well better be right.

Also last week the Qlik AI Council issued a call to companies to “prepare for the hard part of AI.” First off, what is the AI Council?

A couple years back we formed the AI council. What we really wanted was to bring together a group of experts who could advise us, basically, on what we don’t know about what we don’t know. What we did is we went outside of, I’d say, traditional industry, and we got AI experts to advise us on things like ethics, on things like government regulations.

What we really wanted to do is when we built our AI strategy was to be informed by these experts to help us understand different perspectives that maybe we wouldn’t see from the day-to-day corporate world we live in.

And honestly, we think it’s a huge differentiator for us, because it sets us apart from, I think, some of the larger vendors who are very myopic and, you know, ‘We know best.’ We don’t always know best, but we get the right advisors to help us synthesize and figure out what’s best.

Just what is the ‘hard part’ of implementing AI and what do organizations need to be doing right now as AI moves deeper into workflows, AI policy environments diverge and AI model choice keeps changing?

You’re going to hear these three words over and over again [at Qlik Connect]—and I’m glad to see other vendors starting to copy us. It is ‘trusted data foundation.’ You cannot achieve success with AI or agentic AI unless you have a trusted data foundation.

And I like to say, we’ve been getting ready for this moment for years and years and years with the platform we built, because we’ve done 14 acquisitions and spent about $2 billion in R&D over the years building out a foundation that allows us to do data integration, harness data from diverse sets of sources, ERP systems, mainframes everywhere. But more importantly, we govern and check the quality of [the data], transform it and make sure that it’s ready to feed into AI models.

We have something called the Trust Score for AI that enables customers to actually inspect their data and see if it really is high enough quality to put into AI. Without all that, you got nothing. You know, models are going to be a dime a dozen. It’s going to be the model of the week. But what doesn’t change is the quality of your data. If it’s good, you’re going to get success. If it’s not, you might as well give up.

Is moving from AI ambition to operational reality a roadblock for many businesses and organizations right now? And if so, why?

There are various studies out there, but there’s one that says that 86 percent of companies who are embarking on AI projects have not achieved the return on investment they expected. So the answer to your question is ‘yes,’ people are struggling to achieve value. Most companies have a strategy, most companies are not realizing that strategy.

And again, the reason is, they haven’t thought it through from end to end. Our story is always going to be that, look, you have to do the work, you have to build the foundation. You can’t skip to the end and just put up a model and expect it to work.

And what we’ve seen is a lot of experimentation, a lot of proof of concepts, and maybe a lot of very small wins. But what we haven’t seen is companies truly taking AI and making it foundational to their business, have it permeate every single kind of operation in their company, every single workflow.

And honestly, Qlik is the only one really positioned to do all of that, to harness the data, build that trusted data foundation. Our analytics engine is unique in the marketplace, it is able to actually take disparate data and make sense of it. And then, with our agentic framework, you can now take that and get an insight, take action.

On the first day of Connect Qlik is making a number of announcements around Qlik Answers, Discovery Agent and MCP Server, as well as other agentic AI developments—all with the goal of supporting a more complete path from analytics to execution. Why are these announcements important in terms of what’s happening in the industry right now and why are they important in terms of Qlik’s current focus and direction?

Two things. One, we go at the market from a completely different perspective. A lot of vendors right now are saying it’s basically captive, give me all your data and I’ll give you an outcome.

We actually believe the opposite. We believe that open is the answer. And that’s why, I think, our channel partners are really, really excited right now, because we meet customers where they are, and we think that AI does not thrive in captivity. There are large ERP vendors, large CRM vendors, who are saying ‘We’re going to own everything.’ We don’t think that’s right.

So when you look at our announcements about our agentic framework, MCP, the ability to actually talk across systems and generate insights across systems, [they are] uniquely positioning us to be successful. So we think about our future, we’re betting that open is going to be the way to go. And we’re betting that we are a unique business—and always have been—in that space.

And then the second thing is, the reckoning is here. I was in a meeting with a CFO and a CIO of a very large food processing company. It’s not technology-oriented at all. But the CFO was annoyed at the CIO because they’ve spent a lot of money on AI and they haven’t achieved the value.

So I think what’s happening right now is you’re seeing this reckoning where companies are saying, ‘Look, I’m spending all this money, I’m not getting the return. What do I need to do?’ And that’s where we’re coming in. And what you’re going to see at our conference is us saying, ‘You’re closer than you think to AI success, but here’s what you need to do.’ And we think we are the right partner to help those customers do that.

What do you see as the biggest overall theme for the upcoming Qlik Connect?

Building on what I just said, there’s two things. One is, everybody has got this set of capabilities, right? And what people are finding is, disparate capabilities do not equal coherent success. It doesn’t equal a coherent platform.

So when I get up on stage [this] week, and I say, ‘With AI, with agentic, you’re closer to success than you think,” what we’re going to demonstrate to our customers is using frameworks that they’ve already built, using Qlik Analytics and Qlik Data Integration, that you can layer agentic on top of and achieve success right away.

We’ve got customers who are going to be on stage, who are going to be at the conference, who are mentioned in press releases, who are going to say: ‘I’m getting this return now, real dollars, real top-line and bottom-line impact.’ And that’s really what we want to demonstrate. And we just don’t see a lot of other vendors in the market actually being able to do that right now.

Earlier today Qlik and ServiceNow announced a partnership to expand the integration of the two companies’ product portfolios to strengthen the connection between governed enterprise data, better insights and workflow execution. Why is this important?

This whole conference is going to be conversations about operationalizing AI. That’s where companies have struggled a little bit. Think about what ServiceNow does for companies. They absolutely have got that kind of workflow processing across an enterprise. That’s what they’re really, really good at and they’re a trusted partner with many of our customers.

So the marriage of what we bring: data integration, data quality, data governance, integrated with ServiceNow, helping them marry their data together with data from other sources, with our data quality and data governance frameworks, is going to be one of those, one-plus-one-equals-three-types of scenarios.

So we’re super excited. Our customers are incredibly excited. And you know, our DNA is very similar to theirs. It’s like a very trusted foundation for customers to achieve success through workflow automation and now AI.

What is your message for partners attending Connect? What should be their main takeaway?

It’s going to be built on the same message, which is, ‘You’re closer than you think.’ What we want to do is remind our partners that you can leverage the framework that you’ve already built with our customers over the years. Because, as you know, we have a very loyal channel, a lot of long-term customers, and they can very easily take the next step into the world of agentic and AI. And we want to encourage them to work with their existing customers, work with us, and actually help those customers achieve success.

And then again, the second thing, is ‘open.’ So we know that customers that we serve have heterogeneous landscapes. They can be, you know, Snowflake or Databricks, or Microsoft Azure [and] Synapse, or whatever it may be, we work with all of them. You’re going to see sponsorships, Snowflake and Databricks. And that’s really appealing to partners because we don’t impose an architecture on our customers. We plug in where they need us to plug in, where they want us to plug in. And for our partners, it’s a breath of fresh air, because obviously, as you can imagine, if you work with some of our competitors, they really want you to be full-stack XYZ company.

And then, we’ve created a very easy, flexible pricing model for our partners. It just makes it easy to get started. It’s capacity based: ‘Your success is our success’ is really going to resonate with partners,

I think what we can give partners is really this whole framework of data integration, data quality, data governance, data transformation, and analytics and AI. For a partner, they don’t have to invent all that stuff, we’ve got it all there for them.

Global channel chief David Zember left Qlik In January and Michael Gray was hired as the new global channel chief in March. Has this created any disruption for Qlik in either day-to-day channel operations or longer-range channel initiatives?

Not at all. So David was great. We wish David lots of success. As you know he was brought in by Casey George, who was our prior CRO, and who left almost a year ago. David was kind of from [George’s] network, and so it was not surprising that David eventually moved on.

That said, our new CRO, Brian Hamel, who’s been here close to, well, about three quarters now, Michael Gray came from his network. And we like that. I like CROs who have people who follow them around because they’re loyal and they’ve had success in the past together.

And Michael brings just a very fresh perspective. He’s got large enterprise experience with big companies, like IBM, et cetera, and he’s also got small company experience. He’s been very agile, working for smaller security companies. And he just brings with him a vision for how we can make the channel, I’d say, fit in this new world. When you think about where we need to take things, which is embedding AI into workflows, embedding and leveraging agentic to help companies automate their processes. He’s got that view and that vision.

So we’re really excited to have him. In fact, we’re really lucky to have him. I worked hard to recruit that dude.

Anything else to add about Qlik Connect? What are you looking forward to most and what are you expecting as takeaways from the event?

Well, you know, these are always a two-way street. So as part of this conference, we get the full day [Partner Day on Monday, April 13, prior to the main Qlik Connect conference] just with partners. They give us plenty of feedback, and we relish that. We talk to them all the time, but this is a unique opportunity for them to be together and give us great feedback.

We have our Executive Advisory Board, some of the greatest customers in the world, like Ford and Airbus, who are going to be there in a separate session and giving us advice. So that market feedback is always something I look very much forward to.

And then, it’s just the energy from our customers and our partners. It’s hard to describe how you feel when you walk out of this conference, when you get, you know, the energy from our customers and our partners. It’ll propel us through the rest of this year. You know the world’s kind of a crazy place right now, so it’s great to be able to get everybody together in a nice, happy, safe environment and just learn a lot and have some fun.