How Qlik customers and partners are getting real about data and AI

Following on from Qlik Connect 2025 the data analytics company has been taking to the road on an AI Reality Tour, which recently came to London. To mark the occasion Qlik released research into the use of AI by UK business and IT leaders. Key findings included that nearly half (49%) of businesses saying they lack the internal skills to effectively integrate AI with their existing analytics and business intelligence systems. Other top concerns include incompatible tools and platforms (36%) and a lack of real-time data integration (37%). Of course, Qlik has tools to address these concerns, and strongly in evidence at the event is how their customers are applying them.

From emergency services to hospitality

One of Qlik’s customers is England’s South Central Ambulance Service (SCAS), which was formed in 2006 following the merger of four ambulance services to provide 999 emergency services, 111 non-emergency services as well as providing patient transport services. Mark Green, Head of Business Information for the Service set the scene: 

We were already leveraging machine learning for vehicle analysis based on telematics so we know where all the vehicles are. However, if the vehicle breaks down it is potentially a life-or-death situation and so we wondered if predictive maintenance could help us ensure all our vehicles are available when they are needed. Alternatively, we could get more vehicles but it takes £1m to put a new vehicle on the road and our budget is constrained. We could reduce patient demand, which is being addressed by triaging patients on the phone. Could we also improve performance by avoiding unplanned maintenance?

Vivienne Parsons, Senior Management Information Analyst at SCAS continued:

We decided to look at the health of the vehicles, to use AI to create intelligent vehicle management for the ambulances. Working with Qlik, Differentia Consulting and UK Government’s Ordnance Survey department, we pulled together data from vehicle telematics, geospatial data, vehicle maintenance data and 999 activity, to train the model.

A risk profile was created for each vehicle, enabling the SCAS to be more proactive in servicing the vehicles thus improving vehicle availability and saving money on unplanned breakdown costs.

Meanwhile Jim Pickworth, CEO, Urban Pubs and Bars (a group of 60 independent pubs) explained:

The challenge is that hospitality businesses have apps designed to run the business better, but these were never designed to enable data gathering and analysis. So, these businesses are trying to analyse data using Excel.

Jon Townsend, Head Hospitality Data Strategist, with Qlik partner Ometis added:

We took the EPoS, stock, labor and booking systems and using Azure to bring the systems into one data warehouse we overlaid Qlik to create a suite of dashboards, so that each operational manager would run their own systems and present their data.” 

Pickworth concluded:

Now we can measure how many times the offer of a second drink is accepted so we can see how we are influencing buyer behaviour. We have data that we can now interrogate because it is one place, so we can correlate reviews with revenue for example. We can analyse what makes a restaurant successful in terms of square footage, stairs and labour. We can now make real-time decisions. The granularity of the data and the speed of data integration is a gamechanger.

Qlik partner Data Technology and its customers

Professional service partners frequently feature in Qlik customer success stories and so Diginomica spoke to Gus Machado, Managing Director of Qlik partner Data Technology and two of his customers. Data Technology provides data strategy, data integration, data preparation and migration services. According to Machado, the rationale for the partnership with Qlik is: 

We have 250 customers in the UK who are transitioning systems and modernising their data stacks, in order to move to the hyper scalers and for them cost is a big thing. Qlik is a massive technology in helping customers drive those costs down. We are a one-stop-shop for Qlik tools. Customers have chosen their own stack so we will use Qlik tooling on their chosen stack to support their business intelligence and data requirements.

Rob Sanders, Director of Technology and Data with real estate company Montagu Evans spells out why this Qlik, Data Technology partnership works for them: 

We use the Microsoft stack, but we will continue to use Qlik and Data Technology. We have to get data out of ERP systems and pull data through APIs using Qlik’s QVD files as a data repository so we can present in one dashboard. We have to present data to clients and that is more controllable via Qlik.

He added:

]We don’t have a development team in-house, so we seconded two people from Data Technology to be on site helping us, and we also use Data Technology’s offshore team to maintain the apps.

Mike Gibbons, CIO, Holcim UK, a building materials and construction company described his situation:

We moved from JD Edwards to SAP (not a like-for-like transition) as we have created a federated system with SAP Ledger, Salesforce and Coupa and bolted this into home-grown digital solutions.  We adopted Qlik after a Proof of Concept (PoC) project helped us identify bad data and clean it enabling us to close the books in 36 hours as opposed to five days. We now have data as an asset rather than a cost. Qlik can help with cleansing and makes sense of unstructured data. We have a very dynamic bill of materials and so we need to cut through the fog of data. Qlik is a major tool to help us with this for carbon capture and reporting. We are four years into a five-year program and Data Technology is like an extension of our team with embedded Business Intelligence experts helping us. This partnership with Data Technology was necessary because we were early adopters in using Qlik.

My take

The key takeaway from the many conversations at the AI Reality Tour was that none of these Qlik customers see AI as a gimmick and that they are each clearly starting with a small business problem and using Qlik tooling and partners to enable them to get their data in shape in order to apply AI to solve that problem.