Harnessing Unstructured Data, Barrier to Implement AI, Agentic AI

What’s standing in the way of GenAI adoption—and how are data leaders moving past it? At Qlik Connect, I spoke with Charlie Farah, Field CTO for Analytics and AI at Qlik, to unpack what’s really happening in enterprise AI adoption right now.

A few things stood out from our conversation:

— Unstructured data is finally becoming usable.

Charlie noted that we’re seeing a shift—from collecting unstructured data to actually activating it. Enterprises are building new workflows around unstructured inputs like documents, emails, and chat, not just storing them for later.

— IT and data teams still face friction.

The biggest blockers to adopting AI and GenAI tools? Data quality, governance, and lack of context. It’s not that companies don’t want to use AI—it’s that their data foundation isn’t ready for it.

— Agentic AI may change that.

Agent-based models are creating a new layer of intelligence. Instead of relying on one-shot prompts, teams are starting to experiment with systems that can reason over data, adapt, and handle multi-step tasks. Charlie called out this shift as one of the most exciting evolutions for the second half of 2025.

These insights aren’t just theoretical—they’re based on what Qlik is seeing across industries right now. If you’re thinking about what’s next for your AI roadmap, this is the kind of field perspective worth paying attention to.

What’s the biggest challenge your team is facing with AI adoption today?

#data #ai #agents #qlikconnect #theravitshow