Mike Potter, Qlik | Qlik Connect 2025

Well, I think the vibe's been quite exciting. The reaction to all the new stuff we talked about today was really, really positive and really is great to get us excited about what we've done. Two big initiatives, really. One around continuing to drive our AI strategy through Qlik Answers, and second is basically the Open Data Lakehouse with Iceberg support. And so both of those things are just continued demonstrations of our ability to advance the roadmap and bring continuous value to our customers.

Well, it's funny. What I love about this conference is that I can barely walk down the hallway without someone pulling me aside and telling me how excited they are about what we've done for them in the past and how they've turned it into a reality and how it's actually helped them and their users. But more importantly, it's really about them giving feedback on what they saw today. And so it's a great way to every year sync up and have those real conversations and get real feedback in real time.

Well, so one of our greatest assets really is what we built in the platform ranging from our cloud native architecture that's capable of scaling and supporting customers across a variety of enterprise class workloads to really driving the flexibility and being able to simplify the world for the customer. So for example, when you look at Qlik Answers, you don't have to spend a lot of time worrying about what the backend is of that. You can let us help you do that through our platform and our AI platform support. The other thing we do is we take a lot of the rote tasks out of the equation. So really what you're focusing on is driving the customer value rather than getting bogged down in a lot of programming and a lot of low level stuff.

Well, I think one of the biggest challenges because things are moving so fast, particularly around GenAI and where AI is going, is that if you blink, technologies change underneath. And so a lot of companies are finding their time chasing the advancements, whereas what we wanted to be able to do is really focus on the use cases that solve problems for customers, make the right technology choices for that, and then implement them so that they work and they're actually... They scale and they meet the need. And at the same time keeping an eye on what the trends are so that we're ready for the next leap. It's a very busy and complicated thing to keep on top of.

Any trends? That's a great question. I think just the level of buzz around what's possible, both with our data integration capabilities as well as being able to create AI ready data, bringing those two worlds together, I think is a conversation that people can have now. I think a lot of times with a lot of approaches that other vendors take, you have to pick one or the other.

I think it's just... Just watch this space when it comes to the integration of structured and unstructured data. Watch this space in terms of being able to integrate answers into workflows, into bringing it ubiquitously to end users. I think the biggest advancement that we're making is that we're not making AI a problem for specialists, we're making it something that just enables everybody. And I think for us, that's the exciting place to go. And by leveraging our analytic capabilities and our Qlik engine, I think we have a real opportunity to distinguish ourselves because we have this foundation that is so strong, and then being able to embrace these new use cases, I think will just set us up for the future.