TLDR: Qlik’s global AI Reality Tour, including a stop in Johannesburg on September 29, 2025, is showcasing practical strategies for businesses to move beyond AI hype and achieve real-world execution. The company stresses the critical role of robust data foundations, trusted data, and efficient analytics in successfully deploying AI and generating tangible economic value.
Qlik, a prominent leader in data integration, quality, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI), recently continued its global ‘AI Reality Tour’ with a significant stop in Johannesburg on September 29, 2025. This acclaimed annual series of business presentations is designed to provide C-Suite executives and AI decision-makers with actionable strategies for transforming data, analytics, and AI within their organizations.
Tejas Mehta, Qlik Senior Vice President and General Manager for the Middle East and Africa, highlighted the tour’s evolution, stating, “Last year’s discussion addressed AI hype; this year it’s about real-world execution.” He underscored the foundational importance of data, adding, “Data foundations are critical, and without them AI remains ineffective, and indeed is just a buzzword.” This sentiment was echoed by Qlik CEO Mike Capone, who believes, “the AI race will be won by embedding AI into business systems to generate tangible economic value.” Qlik’s commitment to this vision is built on three core pillars: trust, efficiency, and natural language, aiming to convert data into tangible business value.
The tour delves into how Qlik’s suite of tools is fundamentally changing data interaction by unifying both structured and unstructured data analytics. This capability allows Qlik’s agentic AI to make decisions, plan actions, and learn from experience. The company’s offerings, including Qlik Cloud Analytics and Qlik Talend Cloud, are presented as key enablers for building open, future-ready data architectures using modern lakehouse principles like Apache Iceberg, thereby accelerating time to insight and maximizing data value.
During the ‘Do Data Differently’ segment of the program, discussions revealed that while 89 percent of organizations surveyed by IDC (2025) have integrated AI into their business strategy, only 26 percent have actually deployed it. This highlights a significant gap between strategy and execution, and the challenge of scaling AI effectively. Qlik’s generative AI products are designed to make unstructured data more accessible, addressing a crucial need in the market.
Attendees of the AI Reality Tour gain practical guidance on modernizing their data stack, improving data quality and trust, and developing a deeper understanding of AI’s real-world applications. The event also showcases Qlik’s latest innovations, such as real-time Iceberg ingest, adaptive optimization with Qlik Open Lakehouse, structured data support, and new agentic experiences in Qlik Answers, Predict, and Automate. These tools are designed to deliver conversational insights, predictive intelligence, and automated actions, empowering users to move from questions to outcomes rapidly.
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Qlik’s AI Reality Tour serves as a vital platform for industry leaders and professionals to explore how to ‘Do Data Differently,’ transforming complex data landscapes into actionable insights through platform-agnostic technology that leverages pervasive data quality and advanced AI/ML capabilities.
