The Qlik AI Advantage: ROI positive analytics and AI
It’s been nearly three years since generative AI burst onto the scene, promising to revolutionize decision-making and operations for enterprises. The early days were all about visions and roadmaps; but now, boards and CFOs are demanding real ROI and measurable business impact from their investments. At the same time, the need for the capabilities AI can deliver has never been greater – tariffs, geopolitics, supply chain volatility, and monetary policy are forcing organizations to adapt faster than their systems were built to handle. Agentic AI, with its autonomous ability to sense, reason, and act, is the latest perceived panacea, and organizations are pouring millions into exploring the technology. But the hype is giving way to execution pressure—and a reckoning for results.
The brutal reality? A recent MIT report revealed that 95% of generative AI pilots fail to deliver rapid revenue acceleration, stalling with little to no P&L impact [1]. AI has only grown more complex, not less: the agentic stack introduces orchestration layers, multi-store designs (relational + vector + graph), prompt and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, and protocols like MCP for secure agent-system connections or A2A for multi-agent communication. If you skip the rigor on semantics, governance, lineage, and operational errors compound through chains—turning a small mistake into cascading issues. Gartner predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027 due to escalating costs, unclear value, and inadequate risk controls [2].
Bottom line: The AI race is on, but the winners will be those who leverage models to build trusted, governed, ROI-positive systems—at speed.
What Companies Truly Need: Realistic Pathways to Success
At Qlik, we’ve had hundreds of conversations with executives, architects, engineers, data scientists, and analysts across a wide range of industries and regions, and we've uncovered what separates the hype from real value. Enterprises don't need more buzz; they need a simplified on-ramp to AI that's impactful now, scalable going forward, and transformative later — without unicorn teams or blank-check budgets. It must launch in weeks with governed data, clear definitions of business goals, and robust security, then iterate to more ambitious goals over time based on measured outcomes.
Core to winning: Strategy-first, not model-first. AI must accelerate your go-to-market and operating model—It’s a force multiplier for your strategy, not a substitute for one. We consistently hear from executives that AI must deliver on their strategic imperatives, driving the core metrics they’re accountable for:
Manufacturing: "We need AI to optimize yields through efficiency analytics, build supply chain resilience with predictive forecasting, and streamline procurement for cost optimization and sustainability."
Retail: “We need AI to sustain margins through cost control and dynamic operations, increase foot traffic with consumer insights, and enhance loyalty via personalized engagement strategies.”
Finance: "We need AI to enhance risk management through predictive modeling, ensure financial resilience amid uncertainty with advanced forecasting, and optimize capital allocation for growth and compliance."
Government: "AI must help us predict crime hotspots to keep communities safe, automate citizen services to cut wait times, and stretch our budgets further by optimizing infrastructure investments."
Lastly, from the viewpoint of the CDAO, CTO and internal IT teams: AI must scale across business lines, org structures, teams and skill sets. The use-cases are vast and the potential user population is large – while at the same time the need for governance, data sovereignty, and security remains paramount.
To meet these demands, executives need a realistic path for AI: projects that deliver measurable impact, ensure a clear path to ROI-positive outcomes, are achievable by their teams, and drive results with urgency. This demands a foundation that builds upon what you already have: from data and technology systems and stacks to engineering resources and skills, and even budget constraints and deadlines. Success hinges on pragmatic pathways that align with business needs—focusing on high-value projects for quick wins while scaling to future demands and adaptive ecosystems.
AI is a force multiplier for your existing strategy—not a substitute for one.
The Qlik Advantage: Unlocking The Power of Your Data For ROI Positive AI Investments
Qlik exists for this moment. Our focus—across data integration, analytics, and AI—has always been practical and tangible: Actionable insight. Speed. Cost efficiency. Trust. We're a truly independent platform with end-to-end capabilities from data to insight to action. We are underpinned by game changing technologies across the entire life cycle. We're the high-performance data layer that unifies your AI ecosystem, turning data into actionable advantage.
Qlik’s end-to-end platform
A Trusted Data Foundation – High Quality Data Products for AI
A Game Changing Analytics Engine – Contextual Analytical Calculations at Scale
Once we have the fuel, we want to turn it into insight, action, and business outcomes. At the heart of our analytics platform is our game-changing Analytics Engine. Unlike SQL-based architectures, our engine consistently delivers fast, efficient, contextual analytical calculations for both users and AI, even when scaled to massive query volumes.
A Portfolio of AI-Driven Solutions – Fast Insight and Action From Your Data
On top of this core technology, our analytics and AI capabilities deliver a full breadth of apps, assistants, and agents aimed at exploration, discovery, interaction, prediction, detection, and action:
Qlik Analyze: Governed, highly interactive analytics apps, infused with AI assistance, purpose-built to solve business challenges.
Qlik Predict: No-code Automated Machine Learning (AutoML), for building and deploying predictive models that move insight from the past to the future.
Qlik Answers: A natural language assistant, running on a new multi-agent framework, delivering insight from both analytics and unstructured content.
Qlik Automate: Powerful automation workflows, for no-code, insight-driven actions into downstream apps—closing the data-to-action loop.
This is where it all comes together: our trusted data foundation connects all your sources to build data products, our market-leading Analytics Engine uncovers unique insights for users and AI with speed and efficiency at scale, and our AI solutions portfolio delivers actionable insight and outcomes. This unique and holistic approach delivers transformative strategic benefits:
Trust: Quantifiable lineage, explainability, and the Qlik Talend Trust Score™ ensure compliant, reliable AI.
Insight: Our analytics engine surfaces insights and anomalies for smarter decisions, with speed, scale and efficiency.
Time-to-value: No-code/pro-code pipelines and simple, fast AI deployment deliver real value right now
Cost: Open lakehouse patterns and data warehouse query optimization can reduce expenses by over 50%.
Efficiency: Automation drives insights into workflows for seamless operations.
Independence: Open APIs, seamless integration, and emerging standards like MCP and A2A avoid vendor lock-in.
The result is a unified platform that enables a realistic pathway to trusted, ROI-positive AI—achievable by your team, aligned with your strategy, and future-proofed.
We’ve spent years helping enterprises deliver quantifiable value from analytics and AI—grounded in governance, fueled by context, and delivered to the last mile of action. That’s our lane. If you're ready to turn AI ROI positive, let's talk.