Artificial intelligence became one of the hottest tech topics in 2017 and is still attracting attention and investments. Although scientists have been working on the technology and heralding its numerous anticipated benefits for more than four decades, it’s only in the past few years that society’s artificial intelligence dreams have come to fruition.

Back in 1972 the late, great Lou Reed released “Perfect Day”, a slow, dreamy ballad capturing a couple’s perfect day in the park. The song makes me think how strong relationships can make every day perfect. Strong relationships are built on trust.

In 2012 when I worked at Lenovo, the company set out on a journey to create the Lenovo Unified Customer Intelligence (LUCI) platform. The decisions we made with regard to people and technology involved in that project helped to shape my self-development, relationships with others on the team, and relationship with executives.

In recent years, APIs have encouraged the emergence of new services by facilitating collaboration between applications and databases of one or more companies. Beyond catalyzing innovation, APIs have also revolutionized the customer-company relationship, allowing it to provide an accurate and detailed picture of the consumer at a time when a quality customer experience now counts as much as the price or capabilities of the product.

Qlik is at the forefront of bringing augmented intelligence even further into analytics, helping business users scale their ability to explore and surface key insights from all their data. As we expand the role and use of analytics through our customer organizations, we know that making it easier for users to interact with data is essential to both increased adoption and higher data value.

There is so much talk about the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), especially in the Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics arena. The most powerful examples revolve around the ability of machines to spot patterns and trends within huge volumes of data.

AB InBev, headquartered in Belgium, is one of the largest fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies in the world with a diverse portfolio of well over 500 beer brands, including Budweiser, Corona, Stella Artois, Beck’s, Hoegaarden and Leffe.

While the transformation to a data-driven culture needs to come from the top of the organization, data skills must permeate through all areas of the business. Rather than being the responsibility of one person or department, assuring data availability and integrity must be a team sport in modern data-centric businesses. Everyone must be involved and made accountable throughout the process.

With the release of Yellowfin 8, we launched our new Stories feature. It was supposed to solve a cutting and pasting issue, but we discovered it solved a problem far bigger than we knew existed.

At Qlik, we have a saying that an angel loses its wings every time data is exported to a spreadsheet. Don’t be responsible for an angel losing its wings.