Gartner’s 2025 data trends reflect the evolving landscape where data moves from specialized domains to ubiquitous business necessity. As organizations face pressure to extract more value from expanding data volumes, AI-centric technologies dominate the recommended strategies. These trends highlight a crucial shift in data management philosophy—moving from isolated analytics to integrated, AI-enhanced decision systems that deliver actionable insights across the enterprise.
The big picture: Gartner has identified nine key data and analytics trends for 2025, with AI-related technologies comprising more than half of the recommendations for digital leaders.
- AI agents lead the list as organizations increasingly implement autonomous assistance capabilities across business sectors.
- The trends reflect a fundamental shift as data analytics transitions “from the domain of the few to ubiquity,” according to Gartner VP analyst Gareth Herschel.
Key recommendations: Data and analytics leaders are advised to implement multiple AI-powered approaches to maximize their data strategies.
- Organizations should deploy AI agents to access and share data across applications and automate closed-loop business outcomes.
- Leaders should explore composite AI by leveraging multiple AI techniques beyond generative AI to include machine learning and data science disciplines.
Market evolution: Small language models (SLMs) are gaining prominence over the large language models (LLMs) that initially dominated the generative AI landscape.
- SLMs offer lightweight, tailored alternatives that are cheaper and faster to train for specific business use cases.
- These specialized models provide efficiency advantages for organizations with targeted data needs.
Data enhancement strategies: Synthetic data emerges as a critical tool for supplementing incomplete information and protecting sensitive data.
- Organizations can use synthetic data to build more complete foundations for AI initiatives.
- This approach allows companies to replace sensitive information with synthetic alternatives, enhancing privacy protection.
Organizational enablers: Beyond AI technologies, Gartner recommends implementing metadata management solutions and creating consumable data products.
- These foundational elements allow different teams to access and utilize data for business-critical applications.
- Multimodal data fabric and decision intelligence platforms also made the list of recommended technologies.
Why this matters: As data volumes grow exponentially, organizations face mounting pressure to extract meaningful insights while managing increased complexity and heightened stakeholder expectations.
- The recommended trends provide a roadmap for data leaders to meet these challenges through AI augmentation and modernized data infrastructure.
- Companies that successfully implement these strategies will gain competitive advantages through more efficient, effective data utilization.
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