Olawale Oladehin on Advancing Enterprise AI Adoption with AWS and Qlik – Tech Talks

We are here at Click Connect, connecting with a lot of the companies, uh, partners and customers of Qlik to learn more about how they're, uh, reacting to the announcements and how they're integrating click's data and analytics features. I'm here with Wale ing from, uh, AWS to talk a little bit about the ways in which, uh, Amazon's cloud is, uh, partnering with Qlik is compatible with Qlik and is supporting the same kind of customers, uh, enterprise customers that Qlik supports. Wale, thank you for joining me.

Yeah, thank you for the time. I'm really excited. It's been a great event so far.

It has been. I mean, we had, uh, we recorded some sessions with you yesterday, uh, technical deep dives with you and with, uh, Qlik and with others. Uh, talk to us a little bit to start off with, um, overall about the, the relationship between Qlik and AWS.

Um, what is it that you see in Qlik that you think, uh, is, uh, relevant with AWS as well? Yeah, I think it's, uh, what, what I think is really exciting and you see it from enterprise customers is that data continues to be a differentiator. The data quality, the data integration, the data movement, uh, being able to have the right technical tools Yep.

The right kind of partnership so that you can make really fast decisions. And I think in a day of where data engineering can feel overwhelming, making it very simple to get, not just started, but actually do it at scale. And so Qlik brings that level of data insights, data quality, data integration, data movement, AWS side, all the infrastructure managed services on top to build, whether it's AI capabilities or productivity capabilities.

So it's been a great, great partnership and it's also been exciting to see our joint customers utilize both. Yeah, I think that that's really what it comes down to, isn't it? Uh, customers are, uh, customers of AWS, they're customers of Qlik and they want to see integration.

They want to see things work. And I think the key to that is, uh, in my opinion at least, is open standards. Mm-hmm.

Um, you know, one of the things that we are hearing a lot about is, uh, data lakehouse, uh, based on, uh, iceberg, uh, I know that AWS is also very, very committed to open standards and interoperability. I'm sure that was music to your ears. Yes, yes, it was.

And so the Lake House announcement today was, it was fascinating to see, I think a few things that jump out. Um, the idea that, you know, I start, I started in the cloud like over 10 years ago, and at that point, everyone's like, lock in. I've got this standard, it's only used with this proprietary database, and I've gotta pull it out and make some changes, like put it somewhere else.

And then seeing like Lakehouse Apache Iceberg coming out on a click side. Uh, last year at our reinvent conference with our S3 service, our storage service, we announced Apache Iceberg integration support. But I think it gives customers is flexibility and choice and consistency.

So now you can say, I've got a common standard in the integration of APIs, and now my tools can interact with those standards. And I think that's really the best of both worlds, right? It's not locking anymore.

It's a common API common framework, common protocol. And now all your tools that adhere to that protocol can sit on top for visualization, for analytics, for data cleansing, and so on and so forth. So I, I think that's been really nice to see.

I actually expect that open standard to continue as we get into the, the other worlds like ai. Well, exactly. And, and I would, I would certainly guess that, uh, as companies are implementing, especially AI agents, that they would be looking for a similar approach on openness and flexibility and integration.

And another thing I know that AWS is uniquely qualified to do, um, sovereignty, the fact that, uh, you have, uh, infrastructure basically everywhere that companies can keep their data where they want it in order to help keep it under control. I think that that's a message that we heard from Qlik as well as something that we've obviously heard from AWS for a long time. Mm-hmm.

So, I, I think you touch on something, it's like sovereignty. It's, it's also in a world where AI's moving so quickly, how can we give, probably the best word I can think of is like giving customers comfort. Mm-hmm.

Right. Okay. I understand the data I have in a certain country is gonna be there and I can process, I can put the right guardrails around it and then come into the things around standards.

How can we work together to get the right standards, whether it's agent standards, LLM standards that just makes customers feel like they have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Sometimes it feels like a black box and very nuanced. Um, and then you see that, I think the announcement would click around agents, the agent orchestration that could happen.

And then underneath the hood, how do you think about the governance around it, the controls, the standards that it integrates with? And AWS has taken the same approach with Bedrock mm-hmm. Where we really think about the standards of agent communication, security guardrails, how to prevent hallucinations.

Um, it's, it's fast evolving, but I think the benefit is we're thinking about the foundations really well. Yeah. And, well, that's certainly a message that we hear loud and clear from Qlik is it's all about data quality.

Uh, I love the, uh, data quality score that they have with the Click talent cloud. I think that, um, increasingly as you said, it's about sort of customer comfort. People are scared of, of ai.

Mm-hmm. People are scared of autonomous AI because I think they're worried that this thing is just gonna go run amuck. And yet what, what we're hearing here and what we're hearing from you as well is, hang on, we can get our hands around the data.

We can make sure that it's not, you know, being used broadly across the internet. That, that, that it's not escaping. We can make sure that it's not hallucinating.

We can make sure that it's using your corporate data to make decisions on your behalf. I think that that's all, as you said about customer comfort. Do, do you think that it is reassuring people at this point?

Or do you think that that's something that as an industry we have to do more to help people feel better, uh, before they're going to adopt AI agents? Yeah, I think it's, it's interesting because I can, I can empathize with customers because this train is moving so quickly. Yeah.

They, they look up and every single day there's new models, new patterns, new approaches to ingest data. And it was just like, how do I keep pace? And to move that quickly, you wanna make sure you have the right, um, kind of checks and balances and guardrails and insights into everything that's happening.

So I, I empathize with going, oh my goodness, we're moving so quickly. How do we make sure we we stay on the tracks? Yeah.

Uh, and then I think what's been really interesting, Qlik takes this approach. AWS takes this approach. It's like security, governance, insights, quality first.

It's like a foundational principle that we're thinking about. And what I think is really interesting, at least when I talk to customers, is you get customers who you normally, they're like in regulated workloads, um, pharmaceuticals, they're an FSI like financial. They're actually able to start utilizing technology quickly, why they have the right foundations.

They thought about governance, they thought about security. And then when they come to Qlik or AWS, it's adding in the right features like guardrails to make sure that your LLM adheres to your company policy. Um, the ability to do inspection and understand when things fail and how quickly they fail and why do they fail, not get a hallucination or a challenge.

So I think that's the kind of the interesting shift. I've seen customers who have thought about data residency sovereignty, thought about security, they're able to utilize these tools really quickly 'cause it's part of their DNA in a sense. You know, it's interesting because, uh, from the outside looking in, I hear a lot of people expressing a lot of sort of FUD about ai, but I don't hear a lot of that pointed toward a WSI certainly hear it pointed towards some other companies in the industry.

Uh, do you think that that is because the company has been invested in this? Or do you think that it's more about sort of messaging and reassurance and partnership with customers? It's interesting.

I think there's probably two things that jump out to me. Uh, the first is, uh, AWS and Amazon have been doing AI for a long time, and it's always been underpinned by the best practices, reliability, scalability, security. So I think when we interact with customers, there's an understanding that when we kind of launch a feature or we release an integration with MCP, like an open standard around agents, we're doing it in a very thoughtful way that leaves that like, ensures security and reliability, scalability become like the first thing we talk about, the first thing we we build upon.

Um, then I think the other interesting thing is that, and as you see it with Qlik and the customers we work with, uh, with Qlik, like a vanguard, like we continuously work backwards from customers. So customers don't feel like we're coming in and saying, look, we've got, you know, 200 plus Gen AI features we've launched in the last 18 months. Use all of them.

We're like, no, what makes sense for your use case? Are you trying to build your own frontier models? And how do we help you think about capacity correctly and having the right capacity and, um, tools on top of it?

Do you want to build agents? So do you have these services to use? Do you say, I want someone else to manage it all and I just wanna be able to send my business documents to it and get answers.

So I think as we work backwards, it allows us to pick the right outcome for customers. And then I think it's underpinned by that, uh, long experience of working in the cloud. Yeah.

Well, and that's actually another thing that I want to get to as well. It seems as though the, the whole sort of concern about having data in the cloud and having applications running in the cloud, it seems like that's a thing of the past. Uh, it's not that, that people are cloud first.

It's almost that they are just assuming that things are running as a service, they're running in the cloud, and, and they assume that's okay. I, I feel like that's a big transformation in the industry. I, I, I agree with you.

I think it's, uh, we, we say this, uh, it's like an old colloquialism, but we say like, in the fullness of time, like in the fullness of time, we believe that customers are getting the most benefit from running their workloads in the cloud. We also know it's a, uh, journey. And so everyone gets there in different ways.

And I think that's also where some of those benefits of the open standards, maybe I'm not ready to move everything to the cloud yet, but I'm gonna use Apache Iceberg on prem, which allows me to integrate with some of my cloud tools. Giving customers that flexibility and choice is also important. But I agree, I think 10, 15 years ago, you're like, what is this thing, like this, you know, instance that lives somewhere else in the ether I can't touch and feel, and now it's much more kind of part of the DNA of a company.

Absolutely. And that's, I think the best way to put it is it's just sort of part of the DNA of enterprise it now. Mm-hmm.

It's, you know, yes, things are gonna be running in the cloud. Yes, we're gonna use AWS Yes, we're going to use software as a service. That's just part of how we do things these days.

Mm-hmm. So we had some presentations, uh, yesterday, as I mentioned for Tech Field Day. Uh, we are releasing those on the Tech Field Day website as well as the Tech Field Day, YouTube channel, and Techstrong tv.

Uh, one of the presenters was BA was you, um, talk to us a little bit, uh, what did you present and, uh, what can people look for if they go and find that video? Perfect. Yeah, I was there.

Yes, it was great. You were There. I I know it was you.

I do have a twin. No, I'm kidding. Uh, what was really great about the presentation, I think we covered two things.

Uh, first the partnership with Qlik. Yep. So all the work we're doing around data and analytics together, um, how customers can leverage Qlik in terms of just like integrating with AWS.

So that was kind of part one of it. Uh, then the second part was around how we see AI evolving and the things that we've done to help customers adopt ai. And I kind of gave that paradigm.

Some customers are building models, and so what tools can you use there, like your sage makers of the world, your GPUs of the world. Some customers are going way up the stack and they're like, I just want my developers to get better coding assistance and integration. Okay, what are we doing with our queue services that are really high up and managed to allow customers just to get the value in a certain set of use cases?

And then we spend a bunch of time in the middle. How do we think about agents, agent adoption, security around agents? All of that is around what we're doing with, with Bedrock.

Um, so that was a really, really exciting session. I definitely recommend checking it out. We go in much more in depth, and I think there were just great conversations and discussions throughout.

So, Well that's, that's really what the tech field data, uh, experience is all about. I'm glad that you got to experience that. We will include a link to the, uh, AWS presentation from Q click Connect 2025 in the description here of this video.

Uh, I do urge you to check it out because, you know, you watch these things and you hear people talk about stuff and yeah, it's nice to talk about openness and standards and, and whatever. Well, this is much more, let me show you, let me show you how it works. Let me show you what it is.

Much more nuts and bolts and, uh, I encourage you to, to see the many ways that Qlik customers are working with AWS today and the reasons that they're working with AWS increasingly in the future as well. Thank you so much for this conversation. It's been really great catching up with you.

It's been great seeing AWS so involved here at, uh, click Connect. Again, this, this conference is loaded with enterprise end user customers who are building data and analytics solutions. They are very excited to be able to ingest data into, uh, iceberg, uh, using some of the new capabilities of Click.

And of course, they're very excited to be able to use, uh, the capabilities that are out there with whatever analytics solution they have to process and, and, and find insight in that data. And of course, uh, they are gonna be able to do that increasingly in AWS as well. So it's great to see this partnership growing.

Yeah. Uh, thank you for being part of this. Thank You.

Thank you for a great discussion. I love the questions, love the engagement, and, uh, I'm excited for the rest of, uh, click Connect. Not over yet, so we got a little bit more time to, uh, explore, so, absolutely.

Yes. Alright, well, uh, check the, check out the Tech Field Day videos on the tech field, a YouTube channel. Uh, you can find more conversations like this on our tech field, a plus YouTube channel.

And if you'd like to see the Tech Field Day presentations, again, you can use your favorite search engine or, uh, now you can find us in our new, over the top application, which is called Techstrong tv. Thanks for joining us Balances in guardrails and insights into everything that's happening. So I, I empathize with going, oh my goodness, we're moving so quickly.

How do we.