Getting AI solutions and services to market is a key challenge for technology vendors in the data integration and analytics market, and we heard plenty about this at this week’s Qlik Connect customer and partner event in Orlando, Florida.
There were a number of large enterprises at the event explaining how they were trying to tackle the demands of data management, and moving towards more autonomous and automatic business decisions to gain improved business efficiency, but it was clear that most needed external help in doing it.
Royal Mail Group is a long term user of Qlik software, to manage, organise and present the best data to its operations units, to help improve its delivery services to customers. It is now in the process of moving these efforts into the cloud from on-premise systems, to gain improved and more cost effective business analytics across the business, with the support of leading Qlik partner Accenture.
Nana Akande, director of data products and services at Royal Mail Group, told the conference: “It’s all about leading with value benefits when convincing companies like us to make moves like the one we’re doing with Qlik.
“You also have to take those along with you in the organisation that don’t have the same data literacy as you do. We have a fantastic data team at Royal Mail who know the business and have the enthusiasm to do the best for it, but we also needed the support Accenture and Qlik gave us. Help was needed to start moving our on-premise data systems into the cloud to get the business insights we required.”
Royal Mail is now said to be in a good position to provide the data needed by the AI agents that will come, which will provide the golden fleece of secure, scalable, cost-effective, and accurate business insights.
The message from the stage was that the business was moving away from a traditional “sink or swim” technology deployment model, to one where gradual AI deployments across the business would end with greater success.
Nick Magnuson, head of AI at Qlik, told us: “The AI deployment market is obviously a very fast-moving one, and it is going to take a very big ecosystem to support it, for the benefit of partners and customers.”
He agreed it wasn’t like markets that had gone before it, when companies felt obliged to choose a single ERP or CRM system, for example, and were now looking to get more value from different analytics systems, with the support of channel partners.
He said it was also imperative that companies did their homework and realised what they were getting for their money, as there was a lot of “agentic AI washing” going on. “I was at last year’s big Amazon re:Invent conference in Las Vegas last year, and most companies were claiming to be an agentic AI firm. I was walking past them thinking ‘that’s a chatbot mate’.”
Partners are key to making sure customers are not left short, he said.
