Gartner report: 9 AI-powered data trends reshaping business analytics for 2025

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.