Analytics and Data Science News for the Week of April 17; Updates from Alteryx, Qlik, Starburst & More

Solutions Review Executive Editor Tim King curated this list of notable analytics and data science news for the week of April 17 2026.

Keeping tabs on all the most relevant analytics and data science news can be a time-consuming task. As a result, our editorial team aims to provide a summary of the top headlines from the last week in this space. Solutions Review editors will curate vendor product news, mergers and acquisitions, venture capital funding, talent acquisition, and other noteworthy analytics and data science news items.

For early access to all the expert insights published on Solutions Review, join Insight Jam, a community dedicated to enabling the human conversation on AI.

Analytics and Data Science News for the Week of April 17, 2026

Databricks Turns Google Sheets Into A Live Window Into The Lakehouse

Databricks has introduced a Google Sheets connector that lets users query Unity Catalog–governed Databricks SQL data directly from Sheets without CSV exports or shadow copies. Teams can use a no‑code UI or SQL, apply existing permissions, and schedule refreshes so operational planning and reporting sheets always reflect real‑time, governed lakehouse data.

Read on for more→ Databricks–Google Sheets connector

dbt Labs: AI Is Speeding Up Analytics, But Trust And Governance Are Falling Behind

dbt Labs’ 2026 State of Analytics Engineering report finds that 72% of teams now prioritize AI‑assisted coding, while only 24% prioritize AI‑assisted pipeline management, testing, and observability. Trust in data has surged as an organizational priority—from 66% in 2025 to 83% in 2026—but the report warns that governance and validation are not keeping pace with AI‑driven acceleration, widening the gap between what’s technically possible and what’s responsible to ship.

Read on for more→ dbt Labs trust vs. acceleration report

Mews Adds Native BI So Hotel Teams Can Act On Live Data Without Leaving Their PMS

Mews has launched Mews Business Intelligence (Mews BI), a native data and analytics product built directly into the Mews operating system for hotels. The tool delivers embedded, self‑serve dashboards, AI‑generated performance summaries, and scheduled reports so teams can track revenue, occupancy, and bookings across properties and act on live data in one place instead of juggling exports and external BI tools.

Read on for more→ Mews press release

Persistent And Databricks Bring Agentic AI To Merchant Risk, Moving From “Catch-And-Fix” To “Predict-And-Prevent”

Persistent has launched a Databricks‑powered Merchant Risk Management and Fraud Detection solution that uses agentic AI to vet merchants with multi‑signal checks before their first transaction and continuously monitor behavior once they go live. Built as a Databricks accelerator on the Data Intelligence Platform, it unifies batch and streaming data plus external signals into a governed intelligence layer that can trigger audited actions like holds, watchlisting, or blocks in real time, with targeted improvements in fraud losses, detection accuracy, and manual review effort.

Read on for more→ Persistent + Databricks

Qlik Makes Trust “Operable” By Turning Data Products Into First‑Class Trust Objects

Qlik is expanding its data product capabilities so teams can govern the datasets used by humans and AI with explicit contracts, service levels, and measurable trust signals. New features include Qlik Trust Score, data contracts, SLOs with alerting and anomaly detection, plus a Data Quality Agent that lets stewards inspect and adjust trust metrics via conversational workflows, all aimed at making data reliability visible and manageable at scale.

Read on for more→ Qlik data product trust

Qrvey’s Perpetual Licensing Bets That SaaS Teams Want Cost Certainty For Embedded AI Analytics

Qrvey has introduced a perpetual licensing model for its AI‑native embedded analytics platform so SaaS providers can lock in cost predictability as usage grows. Instead of pricing based on data volume, queries, or end‑users, Qrvey is emphasizing one‑time or employee‑based structures that decouple analytics economics from product adoption, giving ISVs more freedom to roll out richer in‑app insights without surprise bills.

Read on for more→ Qrvey announcement

Reveal Survey: AI, Cyber, And Cloud Drive Tech Job Demand—But Soft Skills Still Differentiate Candidates

A new Reveal survey highlights AI/ML, cybersecurity, and cloud engineering as the most in‑demand technology roles and skill sets in 2026. Employers say data science and DevOps remain hot, but also stress communication, cross‑functional collaboration, and problem‑solving as critical differentiators in hiring decisions as teams work to operationalize AI and modern infrastructure at scale.

Read on for more→ Reveal tech jobs survey

Starburst AIDA Pitches A Single AI Assistant That Can Reason Across All Your Data Mesh

Starburst has introduced AI Data Assistant (AIDA), an AI assistant that sits on top of Starburst and Trino to query, reason across, and explain insights from all enterprise data without centralizing it first. AIDA uses metadata, policies, and Starburst’s query engine to keep answers grounded in governed data products, with features for lineage, citation, and semantic understanding that aim to make complex data mesh environments feel like a single, conversational analytics surface.

Read on for more→ Starburst AIDA

Teradata’s Analyst Agent Lands On Azure To Put VantageCloud At Analysts’ Fingertips

Teradata has made its Analyst Agent available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace so customers can deploy a natural‑language assistant directly against VantageCloud Lake. The agent lets business users ask questions in plain English, generates and runs SQL under the hood, and returns results with explanations, helping organizations widen access to advanced analytics without forcing every user to learn Teradata’s tooling.

Read on for more→ Teradata Analyst Agent

Expert Insights

Watch this space each week as our editors will share upcoming events, new thought leadership, and the best resources from Insight Jam, Solutions Review’s enterprise tech community where the human conversation around AI is happening. The goal? To help you gain a forward-thinking analysis and remain on-trend through expert advice, best practices, predictions, and vendor-neutral software evaluation tools.

Insight Jam and Donald Farmer Launch Waitlist for New Mesh Expert Group on the Last Mile: Analytics Leadership in the Age of AI

Over twelve monthly sessions, a cohort of just eight senior analytics and BI leaders works through the practical and strategic dimensions of leading in an AI-augmented environment.

The sessions build progressively: early months establish a framework for where human judgment remains indispensable; middle months address the operational pressures, data quality, governance, the proliferation of shadow AI tools, and conversational interfaces that complicate deployment in real organizations; later months turn toward team development, role evolution, and a planning horizon of two years.

Join the waitlist on Insight Jam

Solutions Review is Getting Set to Host Alteryx for the Industry Trends event: AI in Analytics: Who’s Really in Control? on April 29

In this fireside conversation, we’ll unpack with Alteryx experts Brett Hamel and Troy Wilson what responsible AI looks like inside real analytics workflows. We’ll discuss where AI performs well today, where it still makes mistakes, and how teams validate outputs without slowing themselves down. We’ll explore what “human in the loop” actually means in practice, what tends to break when AI scales too quickly, and how to design workflows that are transparent, defensible, and accountable.

Read on Solutions Review

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Mini Jam, Q1 2026 On-Demand: The Skills Reckoning on March 31

This program is designed not simply to comment on change, but to explore the structural redesign of education and workforce systems now required to keep pace with it. For leaders operating at the intersection of AI, education, upskilling, and L&D, the Q1 Mini Jam offers a clear view into the forces reshaping how capability is defined, developed, and deployed in the years ahead.

Watch on YouTube

Solutions Review Surpasses 250K on YouTube to Power Unmatched Media Momentum in Enterprise Tech & the Human Impact of AI

Solutions Review has officially surpassed 250,000 subscribers on YouTube, a milestone that’s about more than just the number. This moment marks the payoff of a deliberate, two-year strategy centered on authoritative video, human-led insight, and an early recognition of how AI search engines ingest information, assign trust, and surface sources at scale.

Read on Solutions Review

Solutions Review Editors Launch New ‘Human-AI Ledger’ Newsletter to Chronicle the Human Impact of AI

Artificial intelligence is everywhere—but understanding its human impact has never been more urgent. That’s where Solutions Review‘s latest newsletter, The Human-AI Ledger, comes in. Designed to chronicle how AI is reshaping the way we learn, work, lead, and live, this newsletter explores the soft side of AI—the non-technical, deeply human dimensions that determine whether this technological revolution helps us thrive or leaves us behind.

Sign up now to get a weekly debrief of the latest human-centric news, insights, and commentary coming out of this emerging discussion.

Sign Up Free

How One Solutions Review Article Reshaped AI Answers Across an Entire Software Category

Something just happened in the AI search landscape that most companies will miss. But the ones who understand it will have a multi-year advantage. In January, Solutions Review recorded a 324 percent increase in media domain citations across AI answer engines in less than 30 days.

Read on Solutions Review

For consideration in future analytics and data science news roundups, send your announcements to the editor: tking@solutionsreview.com.