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🔍 Qlik Connect 2025: Turning Ambition Into Action

Qlik Connect 2025 wasn’t just a roadmap update – it was a strategic pivot. Held in Orlando, this year’s global summit introduced some of the most ambitious and technically significant updates we’ve seen from Qlik in years.

From the launch of a fully integrated agentic experience to the debut of the Open Lakehouse, Qlik is clearly shifting from platform expansion to platform performance. We also saw practical advancements like the free Cloud Migration Tool, designed to help customers accelerate their move to Qlik Cloud, and the next generation of Qlik Answers, now powered by Claude and capable of handling both structured and unstructured queries.

But it wasn’t just tech on display. Sessions spotlighted the role of trust, community, and decision-making in a fast-moving AI world – all culminating in a standout keynote from Olympic legend Katie Ledecky, and renewed energy from groups like Women Who Qlik.

Below, I’ve broken down the five biggest themes from the event – and what they mean for how we work with data in 2025 and beyond.

Deep Dive 1: Qlik Answers 2 - Structured Meets Unstructured

If there’s one moment that stole the show at Qlik Connect 2025, it was the next evolution of Qlik Answers.

What started as a search box has become a fully conversational assistant that bridges the structured/unstructured divide. With the launch of what many are calling "Qlik Answers 2," you can now ask questions that pull from both your dashboards and your documents - without needing to define where the data lives.

This isn’t just a UX upgrade. It’s a shift into what Qlik is calling an agentic model - one where AI doesn’t just answer your questions, but proactively guides you with transparency, trust, and actionability.

Here’s what it does:

➡️ Pulls insight from structured Qlik apps and unstructured sources (think PDFs, contracts, policies)

🧠 Uses Claude to interpret multi-layered queries and return complete, contextual answers

🔍 Surfaces a Trust Score to show data lineage, logic used, and how the answer was assembled

💡 Suggests follow-up questions and actions, like scheduling a pipeline refresh or flagging outliers

Why this matters:

• You can now explore governed KPIs alongside policy text, regulatory language, or field reports

• It brings unstructured and structured search into one interface, with no extra setup

• You get answers that you can act on - and you can trace the path to every one of them

This is a big step forward not just in generative AI, but in trusted, guided decision-making. If Qlik delivers this at scale, it could finally close the gap between data and direction.

Deep Dive 2: The Rise of the Open Lakehouse

Qlik’s Open Lakehouse is a bold answer to a big question: how do you scale data without fragmenting tools or locking yourself into a vendor?

Powered by Apache Iceberg and delivered as a managed service via Qlik Talend Cloud, Open Lakehouse offers a high-performance storage layer with full interoperability.

The pitch?

⚡ 5× faster queries and 50% lower storage cost (thanks to auto-optimization)

🚀 Real-time ingestion at millions of rows per second (Upsolver tech)

🌐 Open format (Iceberg) that lets you query the same data from Athena, Trino, Snowflake, Spark, and more

🔐 Runs in your own AWS VPC, so your data stays under your control

This isn't just about storage. It's about:

• Eliminating ETL hops between lakes and warehouses

• Giving you a single layer for analytics and AI

• Enabling governed FinOps with usage-aware cost tracking

Why it matters:

• You can use Qlik as the UI layer for any AI- or analytics-ready data sitting in Iceberg

• Data teams no longer have to choose between performance and flexibility

• It sets Qlik up as the connective tissue between your data engineering and business teams

Private preview is open now. General availability expected in July 2025.

Deep Dive 3: Inside the Agentic Experience

Agentic AI isn’t just a buzzword - it’s Qlik’s new north star.

The idea? Analytics that doesn’t just answer your questions, but knows your context, understands your goals, and helps you get to action faster.

This year’s unveiling included:

🔎 Discovery Agent - Spots anomalies, trends, and key drivers, and pushes alerts when something important changes

🔧 Pipeline Agent - Generates data integration steps from natural language prompts (e.g., "pull recent transactions and merge with customer feedback")

⚙️ Answers + Actions - Qlik Answers now lets you trigger workflows, not just get insights

Why it’s different:

• These agents operate with your business logic, not outside it

• They respect governed metadata, reuse lineage, and work natively in your Qlik Cloud stack

• Every answer includes a Trust Score, so you can validate and understand the logic

This isn’t just AI layered on top - it’s embedded. And the result is:

• Less dashboard navigation

• More insight suggestions

• Faster paths to impact

Agent previews are expected to roll out sometime in 2025.

Deep Dive 4: Qlik’s Cloud Migration Accelerator

Qlik knows it’s time to go all-in on the cloud. But for many orgs, that migration step has been a blocker - until now.

The new Qlik Analytics Migration Tool removes the friction by automating every step of the move from QlikView, Qlik Sense (on-prem), and NPrinting to Qlik Cloud.

What it does:

🛠 Audits and extracts metadata from your legacy environment

🔄 Translates syntax and adjusts configurations for Qlik Cloud

📦 Transfers apps, models, and connections - with fidelity

🧪 Offers rollback options, validation reports, and sandbox support

And here’s the kicker: it’s free.

For any customer or partner ready to move to the cloud, Qlik will even spin up a free Cloud tenant so you can start experimenting before your renewal.

This tool matters because the AI and agentic roadmap only lives in the cloud. If you’re not there yet, this is Qlik’s way of helping you leap forward.

Deep Dive 5: Community Energy and the Spirit of Qlik

Yes, Qlik Connect 2025 was packed with big tech reveals - but what really stood out was the people.

👩‍💻 The Women Who Qlik movement drew real buzz. Leaders from across the ecosystem shared their stories on stage - and off. We covered this in a recent The Data Mix podcast episode, and the energy was even more powerful in person.

🏅 Katie Ledecky’s keynote landed with force. She spoke about breaking world records, using both data and discipline - tracking micro-adjustments across nine years of elite performance. Her message? Always be a rookie and a coach. Stay humble. Stay sharp.

These moments weren’t about product - they were about purpose.

They reminded us:

🤝 Analytics is human work

🏗 Data culture is built, not bought

🎯 The best tech fades into the background when the people are switched on

And if the vibe at Qlik Connect was any signal, this community is more energised than ever to build, share, and raise the bar.

More to come soon. But for now - let’s get back to the work.