Geoff Thomas and Varun Babbar of Qlik talk about the revolutionary power of Qlik Sense, from improving data literacy to navigating digital journeys, optimising data utilisation, and visualising a seamless cooperation between Gen AI and human intelligence for unparalleled business insights
ET Edge Insights recently engaged in a compelling dialogue with Geoff Thomas, Senior Vice President for Asia Pacific & Japan, Qlik, and Varun Babbar, Managing Director – India and SAARC, Qlik. The focal point of the discussion was Qlik Sense, a robust data analytics platform that caters to a diverse spectrum of users, ranging from non-technical individuals to those with advanced technical expertise.
Excerpts
Digital Transformation and Data Integration
Digital transformation must permeate the entire organisation. That is the first commitment that all executives must make. Our collaboration with our customers extends well beyond technology. We gradually discovered that data literacy rates are extremely low throughout, and this is where we make a difference—thus, we raise the general level of data literacy in organisations.
Data literacy can be defined as the percentage of the workforce or employees who are comfortable working, questioning, making decisions, and probing data. We specialise in assisting our customers in preparing for and utilising the data available to them, to ensure maximum productivity.
Many Indian enterprises are taking a digital journey, which probably they would have probably avoided a few years back. We are seeing a lot of people completely transforming their business and leveraging these technologies, creating those data lakes. At our event, an analyst indicated that only 20% of the massive data collected was being used, even though they were sophisticated in many areas in terms of data use. But they have so much data and only one-fifth of it is being used – so there’s a lot of gold in the rest of the data that they are not doing anything with right now.
Customer Experience and Data management
Data governance is important for data management, and this defines customer experiences further down the road. The need of the hour is to have the right governance model in place. Many customers collect data, yet 80 percent of it becomes obsolete because they do not know what to do with it. The most important aspect is that the organisation collects accurate and relevant data, uses it for product creation, and ensures that it is used in the future.
Gen AI and data
Gen AI is a great opportunity to augment or supplement, which is exactly what our customers are doing with our platform. We recently launched a set of connectors -, so customers can begin to integrate it into their existing strategy. We believe that a hybrid approach will be used in the future as customers figure out how to get the most out of it.
We have an ecosystem of partners and system integrators in India, and we are working with them to build models around those things that are specific to their businesses. Hence, our take is that it’s never going to be an either-or kind of situation—human intelligence and Gen Ai will walk hand in hand.
Gen AI is leveraged as a mechanism to assist humans. It throws up possibilities and probably helps in predicting an event and outcome, but then there’s also human intelligence, which would never be supplemented.
