Qlik Acquires CrunchBot to Augment Conversational Analytics Capabilities

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. Users can now 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 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.”

According to Gartner, “By 2020, 50% of analytical queries will be generated via search, NLP or voice, or will be automatically generated”.(1) 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.

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.”