Qlik Acquires CrunchBot and Crunch Data to Augment Conversational Analytics Capabilities

By MTS Staff Writer On Jan 28, 2019

AI-Powered Natural Language Bot and Specialist Services Will Help Drive Analytics Adoption, Customer Success and Data Literacy

Qlik announced it has acquired the CrunchBot AI-powered analytics bot along with Crunch Data Inc.’s experienced team of AI and solution development professionals. Now users can interact with and understand their data using natural language through Qlik Sense and within leading collaboration tools such as Slack, Skype, Salesforce Chat and Microsoft Teams. This expands Qlik’s existing augmented intelligence and cognitive capabilities by delivering additional conversational analytics built leveraging Qlik’s platform and open APIs.

“Bringing CrunchBot and Crunch Data into Qlik will help users more easily inject data regularly into workflows, making analytics an essential element in daily collaboration and decision making,” said Mike Capone, Qlik CEO. “Qlik continually looks for new ways to deliver augmented intelligence to users and improve data literacy. These acquisitions help expand the ability of our customers and partners to leverage data and insights where work happens, increasing the value of both data and the organization.”

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According to Gartner, “By 2020, 50% of analytical queries will be generated via search, NLP or voice, or will be automatically generated”.Qlik’s customers already benefit from augmented intelligence and natural language search capabilities within Qlik, and CrunchBot expands and extends those capabilities through a conversational, natural language interface.

CrunchBot works uniquely with Qlik, bridging the gap between visual discovery and conversational analytics. As a Trusted Extension Developer (TED) accredited solution, validated by Qlik for quality and functionality and built upon Qlik’s open API framework and Associative Engine, CrunchBot enables users to:

Ask questions in a conversational manner through the Qlik Sense UI or popular collaboration tools such as Slack, Skype, Salesforce Chat and Microsoft Teams;
Explore and ask questions of their data through voice interaction with integration to services such as Amazon Alexa;
Receive robust answers and insights including additional context with auto-generated charts, interpretations, key drivers, period-over-period calculations and predictions for measures;
Seamlessly dive directly into Qlik Sense analytics apps based on the results, with the context (selection state) retained;
Leverage unique Natural Language Processing (NLP), which automatically trains itself and tracks user inquiries over time, and Natural Language Generation (NLG) which delivers insights for not only what is happening, but also why – and where to go next.

Unlike standalone search products, this approach offers the best of both worlds – allowing users to enter an experience conversationally and then transition to visual exploration for deeper understanding and discovery. Qlik customers and partners will see increased analytics adoption and user data literacy with a faster and easier way to ask questions, generate insights, and make data-driven decisions with CrunchBot.

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Crunch Data will help drive analytics adoption and customer successes, integrating immediately into Qlik’s existing customer success organization to expand Qlik’s ability to deliver value-added and managed services. The Crunch Data team, a mix of offshore development and U.S.-based AI professionals, has a strong track record of successful project engagements with brands like Century Link and Hortonworks.

“Qlik is the analytics leader in bringing augmented intelligence and machine learning to enterprise users,” said Nish Patel, CrunchBot CEO and Crunch Data Co-Founder. “We’re thrilled to become part of the advanced capabilities that Qlik continues to bring to market, helping enterprise customers realize the bottom-line value of making it easier for their employees to converse with data.”

CrunchBot is immediately available to customers through Qlik today, and will be licensed as a value-added solution to the Qlik Sense platform. To be named the Qlik Insight Bot, this new product will be available alongside Qlik’s existing Insight Advisor capability and will be further integrated with the Qlik cognitive engine to deliver even more value to our customers.