Data 2025 outlook: AI drives a renaissance of data

It’s time once more for the annual sticking out of our neck ritual where we predict will happen in the year ahead for data. The verdict? 2025 will be the year of The Renaissance of Data. But this data “boom” will be different from that of the Big Data 2010s. It’s about enterprises having to get serious about the data they use for AI, because as genAI projects graduate from PoC to production, they will only be as good as they data they are trained on, or are fed

In this renewed age of Data, there are not going to be a lot of new startups. Not just because the brunt of VC funding is going to AI, but because for data, the foundational technologies are already there. The recent Databricks J round underscores this. While the company’s intent for the funding was for making vested employees otherwise awaiting IPO whole, the size of the raise reflects the market’s enthusiasm for a company that is not a pure play AI player, but one that places Data on an equal footing.

We think that GraphRAG will be the killer app for genAI  projects entering production because it makes just too much common sense. Again the technologies are already there and putting them together gives us a 1 + 1 = 3 outcome. But delivering RAG-based solutions must get easier, and we predict that the same thing that happened with ML will repeat itself with RAG: AutoRAG providing a guided experience for chunking, embedding, A-B testing models, and so on.

All this talk of technology is dwarfed by the need for aligning people and process. As noted above, most of the technology building blocks for managing data for AI are already there, but we need to get business analysts, data engineers, and data scientists on the same page.

Click here, not just to get the full treatment, but a (hopefully) objective assessment of how close or badly off our 2024 predictions were. Happy new year!