Qlik Connect, The Data Community, and Qlik’s Work with AI Moving Forward with Gina Rosenthal – Delegate Dialogues

We are taking the Tech Field Day experience to click Connect in Orlando once again this year. And in preparation, I'm asking a few of our delegates what they're looking forward to and what they're thinking about when it comes to data and analytics. Joining me today, I have Gina Rosenthal, who was at our Click Connect event last year, and will be here again next week.

Gina, uh, tell us a little bit in your words, uh, about yourself and about what you expect to see at Click Connect. I'm Gina Rosenthal. You can find me on LinkedIn.

I'm a product marketing manager for tech companies that do infrastructure. What am I looking forward to at Click Connect? It was a great event last year.

I loved it. It was in Orlando, so I'm looking forward to being in my home state, which is great. Looking forward to being at Disney World.

Uh, more than anything. Last year we were able to talk to customers about things that I always hear about. You know, if you're an infrastructure, it's like the customer's, an infrastructure team or the customers.

These are their customers. So to hear how they're really implementing all of these fancy ideas we talk about, about and say, this is how you should implement it, they're actually doing it already. So I wanna talk to their customers.

That's the thing I'm most interested in. Uh, you were at Click Connect last year. Uh, tell us a little bit about what that was like and, um, what you found, uh, meeting with the, the, the folks at, at the Click Connect event.

It Was great. We had a deep dive, I think from one day from the actual product teams at Qlik, so really deep understanding about what they were gonna tell their customers over the following week, but then they have a really vibrant community, which is their own thing, all about data. People that are doing this ML deep learning, um, AI thing.

That was great. Talking to them about how they're actually doing things and then just listening to customers present on how they solve different challenges. I thought all of that was great, and the food was great and the people were nice and we got to see a rocket launch.

I thought, oh, that was cool. Well, I can't guarantee any rocket launches this year, but, uh, you know, and it's Florida. There's probably one, uh, it seems like there's one all the time.

Um, so that, that's actually, uh, let, let's talk a little bit about ai. So Qlik is well known as a sort of a company that exists between data and analytics. They're really a business data company.

They have a lot of large customers. You know, this is really, uh, it, it, they don't feel like a startup. It feels like more of an established company, but yet with sort of a fun culture, of course, AI is colliding with data.

So that's a, a topic that we heard last year. It's certainly gonna be a topic we're gonna hear about this year when it comes to AI and data applications. Gina, what, what are your thoughts about, uh, what people need to know?

Uh, I think the biggest thing right now is AI is an old term, but it's a new term and we're applying it to everything. We've had machine learning and deep learning, uh, workloads around for several years. It's just that every, the hardware is catching up and able to, um, support the all sorts of new, um, uses and make to make the, the data crunching go faster so that the data scientists can figure out new applications.

That's like my biggest thing is we've gotta get over this hype around, I mean, last year it was gender to the ai. This year it's, uh, a gen ai like agent ai. What does that even mean?

But you know, it's, is it English or we're making up a tech English for it, but what are we doing? Are those, um, are those workloads that are gonna help your business? Is that something you actually need to have?

What kind, what, what do you need to be looking at to get forward with, um, your AI workloads that you're planning on? What, what are you doing with your life? That's, that's, that's what I would, is what I would say.

Well, certainly one of the, uh, things that Qlik is bringing to the table when it comes to AI is incorporating, uh, enterprise data with AI models. So whether it is, like we talked about last year with generative AI and retrieval, augmented generation, or as you point out this year with agen ai, it's all about basically how do you open the door to the corporate data lake and bring that into these applications, right? Right.

But I think what we heard last year, and I'm hoping there's gonna be even more emphasis on that, is you gotta get your data right. Um, you see the, you see some of the, uh, specialty, I think some of the infrastructure companies talking about this is how you make it work, and you can car get your data and suck it up and it's magical, you know, be at the magic Kingdom. It's magical.

It's just gonna work. And that's not the case. And we saw that last year with, uh, with some of the demos that were provided.

I like the one, especially with their RAG implementation that, you know, showed that all the concerns about, um, if it an AI sharing your data or data being used, that's not right. You control that. You should be able to control that.

But it also means clicking back and thinking about the data that you have. What are, what, what is, what problem are we trying to solve? What is the data that needs to be here, and what kind of preparation would that data needs to happen to keep it secure, to make sure you don't have garbage data going in because you're gonna get garbage results coming out.

Um, I, I think all of those things are really important. This is nothing, it's nothing different in computer science. It's what are you trying to accomplish on the backend?

What has to be done on this other end? And how do we make that happen in a fast, easy, repeatable manner so that you get clean results with the data and, and you, those results are also protected from the outside world, if that's what you need to happen. We're gonna be live blogging during the keynotes during at, uh, click Connect.

You've been active in social media in the enterprise space for a long, long time, as long as I have. What are the moments that you look forward to during keynotes that you want to share with the world? That's a really good question.

I think if it's something brand new, if it's a solution to something everybody's been complaining about, um, I also like it when, you know, if they put something up there that doesn't click with me and it just doesn't sound like it's right. It sounds like some A RPR person put it up to make a good title. Uh, I usually will definitely say something, put that out then social media to see what people respond and do some digging.

Uh, that's probably it, I think. What's your opinion on, uh, special guest stars appearing, uh, during, uh, keynotes? It can be good or it can be bad.

Kind of depends. I've seen some that just didn't, didn't, uh, resonate. But then you see some that are, are great and, and especially if it's somebody that has a life doing one thing publicly and then they get there and they can talk relevantly about whatever the the topic is, because that's kind of what they really do in life.

Those are always real good. You've also been involved in a lot of Tech Field day events. In fact, you've been part of Tech Field Day for 15 years now.

Oh yeah. What are the things that you look for from a tech field day presenter that separates a great presentation from the pack To know, uh, not to not be giving us the same old, same old, lemme start over. Sorry.

To not come and present what you present to either that your pitch deck or that you pitch to analyst. We probably have already seen it, so to actually know and anticipate some of the questions we're going to have, um, number one, but then to talk about, talk about your product, talk about what problem it solves and then get deep on the tech, but it put it into the right space, but without spending an hour to do that. What are some of the other things that you look for when you go to an event like this one?

Um, what can a company do that shows promise that makes you feel like this is a company that's worth knowing? There's lots of little things. Um, definitely there's a woman's group to put it up.

As much as people don't like to talk about that, it's just true. Um, having spaces where you can just sit and think, this is dumb, but like, one of the things I've seen companies do is bring puppies and it's no selling. It's nothing.

You can just sit there and pet these puppies that come from the shelter. And I, for me, because I have dogs and I'm away from my dogs to do these things, being able to just sit and give some intention and love to a puppy that needs it is great. Um, I also think making, um, your, your technical people, the ones that are making decisions like their product managers available to talk to people like the common people like me, um, I know you're busy and it's a point where you have all of your partners and your big customers there, and you need those people in those meetings.

But it is really, really nice to be able to talk to someone that, that has their finger on the pulse, literally, of what's going on with your products. So Gina, where are we gonna be able to catch you during click connect? What, what's your, uh, primary socials?

Primary Socials are LinkedIn, blue Sky, Mastodon, um, hoping to get some YouTube shorts out. Those are pretty good to do and eventually wrap everything up nice with a bow on the Digital Sunshine Solutions blog. Great.

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