JOHANNESBURG –“Good morning to a new dawn of data – let’s redefine what’s possible where data meets opportunity.” With these words, Tejas Mehta, Senior VP and General Manager, MEA of Qlik – a global leader in data integration, analytics and AI – opened the local leg of the Qlik AI Reality Tour event, held recently in Johannesburg.
According to Mehta during his keynote presentation, successful AI implementations in organisations require decisive action, or businesses will fall behind.
Laying the data foundations for improved business outcomes
Mehta explained that AI success starts with the data foundation, and that data quality will make or break an organisation’s AI experience.
“The premise ‘garbage in, garbage out’ still holds true,” he said, “but with AI, the ‘garbage’ is now generated at an astonishing speed. Our customers make real-time decisions, and they are aware that poor data quality can damage their business.”
Mehta clarified that 72 percent of leading organisations have named managing their data as one of the top challenges preventing them from scaling AI use cases (McKinsey & Company, 2022).
“Qlik Analytics assists everyone in the organisation to achieve better outcomes by revealing answers that visualisation tools simply miss. Our customers are getting their data foundations right and taking advantage of this to move the business forward by improving their supply chains, reducing their carbon footprint, and enhancing their outcomes.”
He noted that there were five key requirements for accelerated AI adoption with Qlik, as follows:
- Move and transform your data: Qlik allows organisations to bring together and transform data of all types, from all sources and in an automated fashion.
- Trust the data: This is critical for governance, while quality data allows you to have confidence in the modules that are being built.
- Access the data: It is imperative to enable access to your company’s data consumers.
- Analyse, predict and answer: Qlik allows data users to make informed decisions.
- Take action: People are increasingly using more automated outcomes as a result of trust in AI-facilitated data processing.
Sharing experiences and expertise
Following on from Mehta’s presentation, it was the turn of James Fisher, Qlik’s Chief Strategy Officer, to take the stage with a second keynote presentation, where he echoed Mehta’s earlier statements, adding that successful AI implementations are tied to having the right data, from the right sources, in the right place while simultaneously being presented at the right time, and in the right format.
“The data must be there in real time, or as near as possible, to support your environment. It must be trusted and able to be run at scale wherever you need it to go,” he continued.
“As we think about preparing the data for analytics and use cases, and also improving the quality of the data itself, we need to break down silos that may exist within the organisation. Siloes lead to errors and the possibility of getting different results from the same data. With Qlik, we are able to create reusable and highly domain-specific data.”
Fisher also spoke on The New AI Reality: Playing the Long Game Drives Value Today and in the Future.
He remarked: “It is still early days in the AI journey for most organisations, and yet waiting is not an option. Companies must embrace this wave, because it will be transformative and much like the internet was, in ways that we can’t even imagine yet.”
The day also featured two customer success stories – from the local group of retail brands, Retailability, and IT technology services provider, EOH.
In closing, Mehta summed up the day as follows: “At Qlik we want to reach you where your data is, and we want to work with you to build your outcomes. We have seen time and again how many of our customers begin with just one product or solution and end up moving to an entire platform.
“Having the right data foundations is crucial, as is understanding the five fundamentals of the AI journey, and how Qlik can assist organisations with their data.”
