**London**: At the annual Data & Analytics Summit, Gartner analysts shared critical insights on nine key trends shaping the landscape, emphasizing foundational technologies and the balance of generative AI’s opportunities and risks for businesses navigating the data-driven future.
During the annual Data & Analytics Summit hosted by Gartner this week, prominent figures from the esteemed IT analyst firm shared valuable insights into current and future trends in data and analytics. Given Gartner’s influence in the technology sector, its analysis of trends and recommendations warrant serious attention from industry leaders and decision-makers.
The summit included a presentation by Gartner VP Analyst Gareth Herschel, who outlined a list of the top nine trends shaping the data and analytics landscape. These trends include highly consumable data products, metadata management solutions, multimodal data fabric, synthetic data, agentic analytics, AI agents, small language models, composite AI, and decision intelligence platforms. While some of these technologies have generated significant buzz, Herschel’s list reveals a more grounded perspective on what enterprises should focus on in the evolving landscape of data management.
In discussing the hype surrounding newcomers like agentic analytics and AI agents, the commentary highlighted the importance of foundational technologies such as metadata management and data fabrics. Herschel stressed that these components are crucial for any company aiming to establish strong data and analytics (D&A) foundations before pursuing more complex AI-driven initiatives.
Gartner’s analysts noted that the implementation of analytics and AI can come with significant challenges. In addressing these hurdles, Gartner VP Analyst Kurt Schlegel provided five key challenges that businesses must tackle to succeed in leveraging D&A for their organisational goals. These include establishing trust with stakeholders, demonstrating clear benefits tied to organisational objectives, adopting a solutions-first strategy, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of corporate challenges, and defining responsibilities between the IT department and business units.
As the conversation shifted towards generative AI (GenAI), culminating in the recognition of its potential for enhancing various D&A tasks, Gartner analysts maintained a balanced perspective on its implementation. Sumit Agarwal, another VP Analyst, highlighted the growth of large language models (LLMs) and suggested a possible shift towards smaller language models (SLMs), especially within environments managing sensitive information. Agarwal stated, “Since the introduction of the transformer architecture in 2017, the most significant advancements in natural language processing have been driven by scaling model sizes and training datasets from millions to trillions.” He outlined that SLMs may offer better customisation and efficiency tailored to specific organisational knowledge.
Conversely, the emerging trend of agentic AI, which automates mundane data management tasks, generated excitement among attendees. Analyst Ben Yan advised enterprises to identify specific applications where AI agents could make significant contributions and to bolster AI literacy among software engineering teams, facilitating a smoother integration of such technologies into existing workflows.
Furthermore, distinguished VP analyst Rita Sallam discussed the transformative impact GenAI could have on analytics, predicting that it will increase the speed of business operations and foster a more interconnected ecosystem. She indicated that by 2027, augmented analytics capabilities may evolve into autonomous analytics platforms capable of independently managing 20% of business processes. However, Sallam cautioned that measures should be taken to manage the associated risks related to ethics and expandability in the use of AI.
Overall, the insights shared at the Gartner summit reflect a comprehensive understanding of emerging technologies while emphasising a stable framework for integrating them into business strategies. This meeting of industry minds underscores the importance of a thoughtful approach to leveraging data and analytics in an age where new technologies are rapidly evolving.
Source: Noah Wire Services
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