Qlik Answers: Making the most of unstructured data with Qlik’s new AI solution

With Qlik Answers, BI provider Qlik has recently released a new self-service AI solution. The tool uses generative AI to make optimal use of unstructured data in the company – for example, for better decision-making.

When companies are looking for information, they often resort to a conventional search, but this usually only provides a list of possible results, not a concrete answer. Users then have to research and compile the required information manually.  Furthermore, integrated search tools often only provide content from a single source. Generative AI can provide a remedy here. It’s a form of artificial intelligence that is able to generate its own new content (e.g. text, images, audio or code) on the basis of complex language models and machine learning.

The new AI solution Qlik Answers uses this generative AI to provide business users with personalized, contextual answers to questions from unstructured data. To this end, Qlik Answers can be used to create personalized AI-based knowledge assistants. These retrieve relevant data from pre-indexed knowledge databases to answer the questions. Various file types such as web pages (HTML) or text documents (DOCX, TXT or PDFs) can serve as data sources.

Finally, the assistants offer a chat interface that can be used to ask the desired questions. The personalized, relevant answers are then determined using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) from the previously created knowledge databases with unstructured data that were added to the assistant. Users can also view the sources that the assistant used to create its answers at any time. This makes it transparent where the information comes from.

Qlik Answers thus combines generative AI with Qlik’s proven data analytics functions to deliver precise, context-related results based on extensive unstructured data sources. The solution therefore allows artificial intelligence to be seamlessly integrated into existing Qlik workflows. The main focus of the application is on the traceability of the AI-generated answers.

Increasing the value of unstructured data with Qlik Answers

Qlik Answers helps to generate relevant and useful answers from curated knowledge databases and thus significantly increase the value of unstructured data. The immediate readiness of the tool reduces the time and complexity of deployment. In addition, the solution offers complete transparency and traceability thanks to answers that are linked to their respective source documents.

Qlik Answers is also self-service oriented, allowing business users to use and manage the AI-driven knowledge assistants without extensive technical expertise or custom development. Access depends on both the user role and the access rights to the respective area.

The following video from Qlik also provides a brief overview of Qlik Answers: