Qlik’s Big Shift: Lakehouse + AI Agents for the Enterprise

Today at Qlik Connect, I watched two major announcements unfold live on stage — and they reflect a real shift in how Qlik is thinking about enterprise data.

1. Qlik Open Lakehouse: Redefining the Data Stack

Qlik officially launched Qlik Open Lakehouse — a fully managed Apache Iceberg solution built into Qlik Talend Cloud.

The focus? Real-time performance, lower costs, and flexibility across multiple engines — all without the overhead of traditional data warehouse platforms.

Key highlights:

• Ingest millions of records/second from sources like SAP, cloud apps, and mainframes

• 5x faster query performance with zero tuning

• Up to 50% lower infrastructure costs via automated optimization

• Access Iceberg tables with Spark, Trino, Athena, Snowflake, or SageMaker

• Full control with Bring Your Own Compute in your AWS VPC

• Unified platform from ingestion to governance and FinOps

This approach gives enterprises a data foundation that’s ready for AI and multi-tool environments — without vendor lock-in.

2. The Agentic Experience: A New Way to Work With Data

Also announced: Qlik’s new agentic experience — a single interface powered by AI agents that simplifies how users interact with data across the organization.

Rather than clicking through dashboards, users will be able to:

• Ask a question in natural language

• Get a trusted, contextual answer using both structured and unstructured data

• Take action directly from the response — through automated workflows

Three agents were introduced:

• Qlik Answers – combines structured + unstructured data for contextual answers
  

• Discovery Agent – scans across applications and datasets to flag risks or opportunities
  

• Pipeline Agent – takes a described outcome and recommends the data pipeline to support it

This experience is built on Qlik’s associative engine — which allows both users and agents to explore relationships in the data and drive decisions faster.

Why this matters:

Enterprises today are under pressure to modernize data infrastructure and speed up how insights become action. These announcements from Qlik tackle both ends of that challenge.

• The Open Lakehouse makes it easier to manage high-volume, real-time data across environments — while keeping compute and cost under control
  

• The Agentic Experience helps teams actually make use of that data, with AI agents that guide users through analysis and decisions
  

In a world where AI is moving fast and data is everywhere, Qlik’s double announcement today shows a clear focus: reducing friction — from data to decision.

I’ll be sharing more updates and takeaways throughout Qlik Connect.

If you’re interested in trying these features early:

• Open Lakehouse is now in private preview, GA coming in July
  

• Agentic experience starts rolling out this summer
  

On a side note —

Mike Capone, CEO of Qlik is the coolest!!!!

Stay tuned.

Best,
Ravit Jain

Founder & Host of The Ravit Show