Qlik’s CrunchBot Acquisition Brings Conversational AI to Business Intelligence
As artificial intelligence (AI) marches on, mergers and acquisitions are matching the pace. Conversational AI, which creates computers that people can talk to, is proving to be a particularly sought after technology.
The latest deal in this sector is the acquisition of CrunchBot – an AI-powered conversational analytics bot – by Qlik, a business intelligence platform that helps companies glean insights from data with visualisation and analytics.
Qlikbot, as CrunchBot is now known, will join the Qlik Sense platform, helping to build out the company’s augmented intelligence and cognitive capabilities with additional analytics and human-friendly interfaces.
When questions are typed into the platform, through both the Qlik Sense UI and other popular collaboration tools like Slack, Skype, and Salesforce Chat, Qlikbot quickly processes massive amounts of information across several different business analytics systems, and returns data insights in the form of charts, interpretations, key drivers, period-over-period calculations and useful visualisations.
According to Qlik CEO Mike Capone, this functionality will make data analytics an integral part of the company’s everyday workflow, helping data-driven decisions to be made faster and more efficiently:
“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 Capone. “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 organisation.”
While consumer AI applications like Siri and Alexa have been making headlines, enterprises have been steadily deploying conversational platforms behind the scenes for applications like data analytics.
This growing trend has put talent and technology in conversational AI in high demand, and several acquisitions have been made by tech giants like Microsoft, which acquired XOXCO and Semantic Machines last year, and smaller businesses in a range of different industries.
