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In June 2026, the highest-grossing law firm in the world committed $500 million to build its own AI platform. The firm put more than 180 engineers and data scientists and over 250 of its lawyers on the effort. It chose to build because general-purpose tools could not execute their transactions or reason over their massive institutional knowledge. That is the bill for a first-class AI product built from scratch.

The results of Info-Tech’s Head-to-Head: Business Intelligence & Analytics – Enterprise are in. In the report, Info-Tech and SoftwareReviews evaluated 360 verified enterprise end-user reviews to set benchmarks for vendor capabilities, product experience, and the full customer relationship. The study evaluates 11 areas amongst software vendors that are especially critical to making and fostering strong, long-term relationships between software providers and their customers. These include.

Your analytics team built a report. It worked fine in development, but when it went into production, users began to complain about loading time. Your team has checked the database and looked at the dashboard configuration, but nobody can find the problem. There’s a good chance the cause is a cross join, and there’s an even better chance it’s executing in the wrong place.

You’ve heard the pitch: AI is going to revolutionize finance. It’s going to write your variance commentary, spot anomalies before you do, answer questions about your data in plain English, and free your team from the drudgery of month-end prep so you can focus on what actually matters: strategy, decisions, and moving the business forward. It’s easy to see why you’d believe the hype.

The plan that fits your workflow is rarely the one you land on if you shop the pricing page first.

I spend my days helping organizations modernize analytics to drive tangible business outcomes and liberate analytics teams from legacy processes. At this year’s Snowflake Summit ’26, I had the pleasure of sitting down with AJ Subbarao, Director of Business Intelligence & AI at Intuitive Surgical (ISRG).

It is Monday morning. Your strongest FP&A analyst opens their laptop and starts pulling the SAP export. They clean it in Excel, cross-reference it against last month's version, and flag the columns that have shifted format again. Tuesday they pull the Dynamics export from the German entity and begin reconciling the two. Wednesday the Polish subsidiary data has not arrived. They chase the local accountant, wait, chase again.

The goal is not complicated to describe. The CEO opens a dashboard, asks a question about regional margin for Q2, drills through to the underlying journal entries, and gets the answer in seconds, without asking anyone. No email to the controller. No waiting until Thursday. No 'let me come back to you on that.' Every CFO who has sat through a pitch for a data platform has been shown this vision. Most of them believe it is achievable. A meaningful number have actually achieved it.

The future of data analytics and AI education has just become even more accessible. The Qlik Academic Program is excited to announce a major upgrade to Qlik Product licenses available for educators and students worldwide. Participants in the program will now receive access to Premium Qlik Cloud Analytics and Premium Qlik Talend Cloud, providing an even more powerful environment for teaching, learning, and innovating with data.