Meet Users Where They Are | Mary Kern, Qlik

David Sweenor 0:00 David, hello and welcome to the data faces podcast on location. I’m David Sweenor, host of today’s show. Today we’re coming to you from click Connect 2026 I’m on the show floor with Mary Kern. She is the VP of go to market, product marketing for the analytics portfolio. Is that right? Mary? Portfolio. Is that, right? Mary, yes, it is.

Mary Kern 0:24 Well, I’ve recently expanded my scope so technically it’s everything. So data integration, everything for cloud, everything analytics

David Sweenor 0:33 and AI, okay, so part of this podcast, you know, it talks about, it’s named data faces, yeah. So it gets behind the people in their professional career. So do you have a favorite hobby that you could share with with the audience?

Mary Kern 0:50 Sure, I have a few random hobbies. So first of all, as Dave actually knows, I’m a huge gardener. So it’s that time the year start getting your veggie garden going. So I do have a huge vegetable garden because it seems like the right

Mary Kern 1:06 thing to do. And I’ve got a bit of a green thumb. I love travel. I love street

Mary Kern 1:13 art, okay, I know. Well, that’s about since I moved to the suburbs from the city. I love my camera that takes actually, instead of, like, taking, you know, video of crime, it takes video of, like, the raccoons in the backyard, which is really new for me, like

Mary Kern 1:29 a raccoon cam, like a raccoon camp, like a wildlife cam in the suburbs of Chicago.

David Sweenor 1:34 Wow. I think I need to get one of those. You do, all right. Well, my tomatoes are started, so we will have a tomato off this year, and we’ll compare pictures a little bit later, later on.

Mary Kern 1:45 So Dave and I actually go a ways back. We’ve worked together before, and we both have vegetable gardens. And Dave’s like, come on, Mary, we’re in analytics. Let’s do this. So we had a full competition where we actually weighed all the produce that we grew that summer. That’s right, competition.

David Sweenor 2:00 We’re have to do that again this year. Oh, that was a lot of work. Yeah, it’s a lot of work. So back to the event. So, you know, we had the the keynote this morning. You know, what are some of the highlights, just overall, of the event that that that just come to mind

Mary Kern 2:14 for me? Okay, highlights. So when I think about an event like connect, so Okay, so I guess these would be like more personal highlights for me. So I actually work on the the product keynote. So actually, one of the highlights of any event for me is actually the calm before the storm, when it’s like eight, 830 in the morning, the DJ is pumping. It sounds like a club. It looks like a club, right? And that’s our last moment to take a big breath, because everything we’ve been working for for a couple months is about to go down, and we’ll see how it lands. So I love, I love keynote day. I love being done with keynote day. The highlight I actually love, actually the show floor is actually always one of my favorites of any event, because I love talking to people. I love talking to customers, and honestly, I get I’m so proud like my team puts together a lot of the product experiences. We put together the sessions, and so there’s enormous amount of work that my team does for this event, and to see it pulled off and come to life. They bring their ideas come to life. They help others bring their ideas to life. It’s, it’s an amazing day.

David Sweenor 3:27 You know, you know, having been on the planning side of this, you know, I know it’s a ton of work, but this event has gone off without a hitch. The excitement on the show floor has been second to none. The activations are great. You know, every huge queue for golfing activation and some other sports, some biking, I’ve heard it’s cool. I haven’t been there. People are loving it. So you into the area with the shoes? Yes, I saw all the shoes. I wanted a pair. So maybe we’ll talk about that after so kudos to you and your team. It’s a great thing. So we’ve been in terms of the keynote, yeah, what were some of the key takeaways that, you know, for people that are just tuning in and maybe didn’t get to see it live or the replay, kind of, what are some of the highlights?

Mary Kern 4:10 Yeah, so I think for click right now, like many companies were all about agentic, and, you know, our, you know, our

Mary Kern 4:18 customers have invested, like, time and resources in their data, and their data

Mary Kern 4:24 states that they’re using to fuel analytics, and it’s a lot of the right ingredients that you actually need to make AI work. And so we just recently launched our agentic experience, and I think that’s one of the key things we want all of our customers to know, is, like, honestly, it’s just a couple toggles to be in production with agentic AI on top of your analytics, which is hugely powerful. We’ve been in analytics and data science for a long time, and it’s always been about enabling decisions and better decisions for a couple. Funny, and I really think now, where, as a business user, you can just ask a question, you don’t have to be careful of how you ask that question, because you’re invoking like data fields, or you know what data is being used, or what application or what technique, literally ask a question as messy as it needs to be, you can ask it and get an answer base, anchored in your x, in your like enterprise data, but also sometimes, when appropriate, bringing in the general knowledge from a large language model. It’s a real game changer, I think, in terms of a business decision maker. And then also, too, we’re rolling that agentic experience out to all the developers on the data integration and the analytics side, so they can also have that productivity boost in terms of getting their job done. And then lastly, I would say, I think one of the exciting developments for us is as analytics evolves, as agentic AI evolves, and maybe our pane of glass is more like an AI assistant going into, not necessarily, our enterprise applications anymore, but that really puts that level of onus in terms of what data are you using? Can it? Is it of high quality? Is it trusted? Do you have access to it? Really gets pushed down to like, like, one step behind Analytics, which is the data product for us, which we’re really investing in building out and have some cool new capabilities rolling out later this year.

David Sweenor 6:30 Yeah, there was a ton of new functionality, and I encourage everybody to go, go check it out on the website. But you know, one thing that I really wanted to ask you is, we’ve been talking about enabling business users, probably 15 years now. We’re older, it’s probably longer, maybe longer. So, like, what, like, what, what’s different about what’s different today versus, well, the days of of old, I guess the days

Mary Kern 6:59 of old. I mean, I think, for me, I do think that, as I was mentioning before, I mean, we just have new ways of solving problems that have been really persistent and hard to solve. You know, which I think is, how do you actually make a better business decision based on not what your opinion is, or your gut is, but what the data says, right? And we’ve been knocking down this challenge for decades, and every single time the data gets a little bit better, the techniques get a little bit better, there’s new ways of doing it, and there’s benefits to that, but at the end of the day, it is kind of coming back to that old age old problem of making a better decision to drive better performance. So we just have new ways of solving these old problems. And so what’s important is about being able to communicate what is different about this new way now, you know. And why is that important? And what’s the benefit of doing it this way versus an older way, right? And I mean, and that’s really hard, there’s lots of ways you can make better decisions, right, sure, but it’s like, what is it that you bring to the game? Why does it matter?

David Sweenor 8:20 Why is it different? Yeah, and I think, you know, one of the things I walked away with from the keynote, you know, is this notion of flexibility. And, you know, in previous iterations and generations of BI and analytics, you kind of, we did say, you know, we use the term citizen data scientist and thing like that, but you had to have sort of knowledge, and you had to unders, you know, have some expertise in that specific tool. But now, with the natural language interface and this, you can be in whatever ecosystem you want to be in? Yeah, whether it’s the analytics platform or you announced a partnership with ServiceNow, we did things like that. So I think that’s one of the big things that sort of it meets you where you’re at to your skill level.

Mary Kern 9:16 Yes, I love that. I was never a fan of citizen data scientists for the record or citizen analyst, I think it puts a lot of onus on people who that may not be their their calling, you know, their aptitude. And that’s one of the things I really love about generative it does really enable. It really meets everybody where they’re at and their skill set, and a really powerful new way, which is really cool, I think. And so I think for us, though, the flexibility never really thought about it in terms of the flexibilities of the tool and being able to do that kind of leveling in terms of where you’re at. And. And we do try to take care of some of that. For example, when we are working on our answers, our gentic experience, most people are horrible prompters. You know, you have to bake that into the experience. But I think flexibility for us, because we are click, because it has always been a tenant of ours to be API first, to be open, to not force anybody to lock in into our ecosystem. Okay, that’s really for us, the flexibility. It’s like we build flexibility, flexibly so like our customers have the freedom to be to build whatever meets their requirements in whatever ecosystem they have, most enterprises have a couple different analytics solutions. How many different data integration solutions? It’s easy to talk to a customer, and they just like, can rattle off the top of their head, like 30 different like enterprise software vendors that they’re using, and we want to, like, fit within that environment and make it easy for them be able to have a turnkey, trusted intelligence layer that they can work with, and not have to, like, do a rip and replace, to rebuild somewhere else to get the darn thing Working.

David Sweenor 11:15 Yeah, the customers I’ve chatted with at breakfast, and lunch and partners. They love click. You know, it’s like, it’s a real buy it from my like, you know, dead cold hands, and it’s, they love it. And, you know, the community is such a part of the company and the culture. So it’s something that it’s pretty rare these days when the cost of sometimes the cost of switching, those barriers are going down, but it’s the community people and the expertise you have. It’s an amazing sight to see here. It is a real

Mary Kern 11:51 fandom that I haven’t experienced in a long time in terms of being with the

Mary Kern 11:56 tech company. But you have a lot of people here, and they’ll say they bleed green, and it’s true. I mean real and we love them, like real, I think self proclaimed data nerds, but you know, you got to love it. Yeah, I love it.

David Sweenor 12:11 You love it. I love I love the green theme. And I do have one question on that, but maybe just the last question from like, practitioner to practitioner marketing. I how to effectively, you know, cut through the noise in the hype. You know, there’s a lot of vendors out there, a lot of companies. I was at the the Gartner data and analytics summit a couple weeks ago. Agentic, agentic, agentic, yeah, on every booth. So how do you, how do you think about that as a professional VP of Marketing, to cut through that, that noise is

Mary Kern 12:49 very loud out there, there’s, I mean, you know, we’re all learning very rapidly with agentic two. I mean, MCP did not exist this time last year, right? Yeah, the development cycles are accelerating. Development cycles are huge, and they’re coming fast. And everybody says that they’re agentic, and your agentic experience may vary. It’s a huge spectrum, right, right? Not just a check mark,

David Sweenor 13:15 it’s like, it’s the experience and the knowledge you build in there history.

Mary Kern 13:19 You know, it’s just like, well, you have assistant, and it’s just like, Well, does is that agentic? Does it use agentic? You know, agentic capabilities? Like, it’s like, this huge spectrum of, like, an agent, is it an autonomous agent? Is it this kind of agent? Is it that kind of agent? So there’s a huge spectrum. So I think for us when we are talking about our capabilities, one we are trying to, hopefully, just like you saw on stage today, we’re trying to speak to the value of the capabilities and what they do for you, and how they do that differently, like what they are, what they aren’t. You know, how they do that differently, and really the value of doing that, and because it’s it is a lot like we have agents. Everybody has agents. We have, but our agents work a little bit differently, and that onus is on us to say, like, like, what makes them different? And why that? Why is that a benefit to you? So it is a really crowded mark, really loud market, and even it’s a big, you know, it’s a big learning curve for all of us, for all like our sellers, for our customers, like, as we were having conversations about, what is agentic, what our agents? Can I fire my whole teams? You mean, it’s just, it’s just a journey we’re all on together, as we’re learning so it’s a little bit hard right now. So I would say simple. Well, you know

David Sweenor 14:42 what I think you did very well. And you see here on the floor, you have the National Health Service over there with an amazing demo you had great, you know, just customer validation on the stage. And I think that that’s one. Saying that, you know, a lot of maybe startups, they don’t have that, that that arsenal, or that library of this works for us, and some of the most complex environments in the world, you know, had ups up there. That’s not, not a small company. And so, you know, I think that’s, that’s one thing that just helps, you know, just peel away speaks to the value directly and just it’s the value of the platform and the things that it’s enabling your

Mary Kern 15:28 customers to do. That’s true. I think the stories are really powerful and and great learnings. Because when you get into AI, it’s not like, hey, a you know, dashboards are, to me, a lot about monitoring business performance. That’s a use case. And so it’s kind of easy to wrap your head around that, but I want to know how we’re doing when it comes to AI, whether that’s predictive, AI, agentic, AI, it kind of comes down to, like, what can I do with this? How can I use this to do something interesting, to drive my company to drive our organization forward. And so just hearing those other stories from customers, or being part of the community where people are active and talking about their use cases is hugely beneficial. Yeah, you’re right, that’s right.

David Sweenor 16:13 Okay, so maybe last one. What’s next? What’s next for click, what can what can we? What can we expect in 2026 oh,

Mary Kern 16:21 2026, well, we did announce a lot of our a lot of our forthcoming capabilities. You know, actually, on the main

Mary Kern 16:28 stage today, we do have a lot of other cool work coming up to semantic the semantic model becomes very important in terms of how we do semantics, and how semantics become like an interoperable layer across multiple systems, not just click. So some exciting stuff, hopefully later this year, more on agentic agent to agent, more on evaluation kind of frameworks, as you’re looking at the quality of agents and of those answers. So yeah, well, I’m excited.

David Sweenor 17:01 I’m excited. It looks like there was a lot a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff coming out, and maybe what I lied I have one last question, yeah. So, the the imagery you have here, you know, I love the posters, you know, it’s got, like, the green and things that are just throughout the site. But one of them in particular, it’s like a green boot, yes. And I was like, Is this a new marketing campaign? Are we going to stomp out the something

Mary Kern 17:30 just curious about the boot? No, it is. So there is a light, it’s like, so the theme for this event is there to be different, and there was a really light superhero theme to the vet. We don’t go overboard, right? It’s very subtle. But there is, I could tell you, there are two places, like on the show floor where you can see this really cool superhero video, where we’re really like the folks who they Ana, the analysts and the, you know, the data engineers, are the superheroes of their organizations, with AI, and so you can actually see that videos where some of the imagery is from. It’s a superhero booth. Okay, see it coming in when you’re coming in from the hotel into the area, you’ll see a woman with, like, this big robotic arm. This one of our analyst, yeah, and then yeah, there’s a whole video goes with it in, like, the hat area. I don’t know where that is, okay, well,

David Sweenor 18:30 I loved it. It’s in the hat area. Well, I loved it. So we have a scoop. There is no marketing campaign called Stop stomp out the AI. Stomp out the competition. No, no. All right, well, but

Mary Kern 18:45 the boots are hot and it’s kind of fun. But yeah, so that’s where it is. It’s kind of with the dare to be different theme.

David Sweenor 18:51 I love it. Well. Mary Kern, VP of Product Marketing and go to market for all things AI and analytics that click. Thank you for being on the databases, podcast, on location, oh, thank you so much. All right. Cheers, thanks, everyone. Cheers, you.