Qlik Connect: Mary Kern On Building AI People Will Actually Use

How do you turn powerful AI technology into something customers actually trust, adopt, and use?

Recording live from Qlik Connect, I sat down with Mary Kern, Vice President of Analytics Product Go-To-Market at Qlik, to explore one of the most overlooked challenges in enterprise AI today. Not building the technology, but making it real for the people expected to use it every day.

Because while AI innovation is moving at incredible speed, many organizations are still struggling with a much more practical question. How do you move from exciting product announcements and pilot projects to real adoption, measurable outcomes, and business value?

In our conversation, Mary shares how Qlik is approaching that challenge by shifting the focus away from shiny features and toward outcomes that matter. We discuss why agentic AI is creating so much excitement, why customers are often much closer to operationalizing it than they realize, and how years of investment in data quality, governance, and analytics are now becoming the foundation for what comes next.

We also talk about the growing importance of trusted data and context, especially as AI moves from generating insights to influencing decisions and actions. Mary explains why simply adding a large language model on top of existing systems rarely works, and why organizations need to think more carefully about how AI is trained, governed, and integrated into the environments where people already work.

There is also a refreshingly honest conversation around cost, experimentation, and imperfection. Mary makes the case that organizations should start now, even if the data is not perfect, because using AI often reveals where the real gaps are and what needs to improve next.

So as businesses look ahead to the next 12 months, what will separate those who successfully scale AI from those still stuck in pilot mode? And are we spending too much time talking about the technology, and not enough time understanding how people will actually use it?

Join me for a candid conversation from the heart of Qlik Connect, and let me know your thoughts. Is your organization closing the gap between AI capability and real adoption, or is that still the biggest challenge?