AI-driven decision-making has arrived, putting a focus on trusted data and strong governance so outputs stay reliable at scale.

The shift is rewriting the relationship between people and data. Instead of relying on dashboards and reports to drive action, AI can now handle much of that work and even act on our behalf, according to Nick Magnuson (pictured, right), head of AI at Qlik Technologies Inc. But for enterprises, the opportunity is only valuable if the data underneath it can be trusted.

“It’s changing a lot of paradigms — how we think about acting on that information, how we think about constructing data and supporting that data through that life cycle now, because we’ve got autonomous things in the mix that aren’t human in nature,” Magnuson said. “I think a lot of the frameworks that we’ve used in the past now need to be rethought essentially from the ground up.”

Magnuson and Michael Leone (left), vice president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, spoke with theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Rebecca Knight at Qlik Connect 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the rise of agentic AI and the need for trust and context in AI-driven decision-making. (* Disclosure below.)

The AI-driven decision-making shift

AI has collapsed the time-to-insight curve that analytics teams have chased for decades. What used to take hours of querying and dashboard-building now happens in seconds. But speed without clean data is just faster failure — and that problem predates AI entirely, according to Leone.

“I think the enablement that we’re going to get from AI now is, ‘Hey, I don’t have to rely on a human to try and go figure out where to pick my data that I’m going to be using to analyze,’” Leone said. “It’s going to find it pretty darn quick and it’s going to do it faster and it’s probably going to do it more accurately than what I think humans have been able to do.”

Yet the goal was never to remove humans from the equation. The winners will be the ones that pair autonomy with governance, context and human oversight so AI can deliver outcomes that are not just faster, but dependable over time, according to Magnuson.

“We have that superpower that we kind of sit above it, and the ability to put in the governance frameworks and the things that make it work over time,” Magnuson explained. “AI is not a point in time, it’s an over time situation. You’ve got to be able to have humans that can get in there and assess the thing, put together the system and then monitor it.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Qlik Connect 2026:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Qlik Connect. Neither Qlik, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE