Blog: Introducing Qlik Answers: Transform Unstructured Data into Insights

Written by Joe Branston, Cybit Data & Analytics Sector Lead – Retail

The data equivalent of searching down the back of the sofa replaced with RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation).

You’ve been there; hours spent searching for a piece of information you know exists.   But where is it?   Buried deep in your intranet site? On that PowerPoint deck Geoff sent round last quarter?  Everyone relies on information stored in unstructured formats to do their job.

Unlock the Power of Unstructured Data with Qlik Answers

This week Qlik launched their new AI tool Qlik Answers, which allows users to speak with their  ever-growing reservoirs on unstructured data, and instantly receive relevant, traceable and explainable answers.  It’s like having a knowledgeable colleague at your fingertips!

Recognised as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms for the fourteenth consecutive year, Qlik has been enabling free data exploration within governed spaces for many years.

It’s part of their trademark and a reason for their dedicated fan-base.   However, the vast untapped potential to explore unstructured content in the same way has been elusive, largely because it’s hard to create a data model from Terabytes of text across dozens of sources, locations and formats.  This is where we add AI and cutting-edge RAG (retrieval augmented generation).

Qlik Answers allows the creation of ‘assistants’ that are assigned to a knowledge base (the data you give them to learn).   These machines will then respond instantly to natural language questions.

Time for some cool examples of questions you can ask: 

1. Technical Support:   Your support team receive a call from an angry customer – ‘This customer’s fridge is making a loud beeping sound, what could be the cause?’

2. Supplier Onboarding: You want to onboard a new supplier or partner – ‘What’s our internal process for bringing on board a new supplier?’

3. Sales Decisions:  The sales department are unsure whether to grant a return – ‘Can this customer return this item?’ and importantly ‘What will our cost to serve be for this customer?’

4. Legal Guidance:  You’re about to send an order form ‘What legal wording do we need to add to this type of contract?’ N.B please verify with legal before sending said order form :D.

The possibilities for driving efficiency and job satisfaction are literally endless.

Challenges in Unstructured Data Environments

All of this sounds like it could destress the day to day of an average worker, while saving vast amounts of cumulative man hours for the company and decreasing manual errors.   While this is certainly achievable, there is a hurdle to overcome before reaping this golden crop.   To wield the now popular adage ‘garbage in, garbage out’, it’s clear that a fast-food retailer with 30 different names for ‘burger bun’ across their global operation will find their new AI friend less helpful than they’d hoped.

While successful with specific process documents and spec sheets, they’d find less accurate answers when exposing Qlik Answers to a large, messy, unstructured database.    Now more than at any point since the dawn of our technological revolution is it more important to address Data Quality. Establishing a control point over your organisations data allows healthy data to flow freely into storage, where AI can work it’s full, mischievous magic.

Chat to us about your concerns over Data Health and Data Quality, and how you’d apply this tech!

Ready for Qlik Answers and AI?

Cybit offer a Free AI Readiness Assessment where our experts will evaluate your data and analytics capabilities for AI.    We’ll identify gaps, risks and areas for improvement, providing you with recommendations and best practices for achieving AI readiness and data protection.

Reach find out more about our Free AI Readiness Assessment or Qlik Answers reach out to me for a chat via LinkedIn or email joe.branston@cybit.com