Throughout 2024, data managers and professionals were at the locus of the new waves of innovation driven by AI and analytics—and the activity was frenetic and intense. As the year 2025 progresses, this intense and frenetic activity will only continue.
Cloud services, AI, AI agents, and cybersecurity are top areas of interest that industry leaders are watching. The following are several prominent trends mentioned that are shaping data management:
DATA CLOUDS
Surging data volumes, scarcer skills, and constrained data management budgets will continue to define data management in the year ahead. Add management’s desire to monetize data assets, and this means greater pressure to “reassess data management strategies, particularly with respect to customer data,” said John Nash, chief marketing and strategy officer for Redpoint Global. “Inefficient, costly, and monolithic tech stacks are ill-suited to meeting customer expectations for personalized, real-time experiences.”
Enter data clouds, which are essentially centralized yet loosely coupled systems for enterprise data, allowing users to access, integrate, and analyze data on a real-time basis from multiple sources and cut through data silos. Data clouds offer a more cost-efficient path to “simplify access to data, making it more efficient to deliver a single source of truth for customer data,” Nash said. “This eliminates the siloed data that traditionally prevent companies from becoming customer-centric, because they lack a single view of the customer across channels.”
As generative AI is more widely adopted across enterprises, data clouds will “make it easy to quickly spin up an application,” Nash pointed out. “If generative AI is tasked with conversing with customers, with finding the right product to recommend, or otherwise improving the customer experience, it stands to reason that the more is known about a customer, the better and more relevant the AI-generated experience.”
AGENTIC AI
Data will become the foundation of a new powerful wave of AI progress—agentic AI, in which AI can make autonomous decisions and deliver actions with limited human oversight.
In many ways, agentic AI systems are designed to serve as coworkers or assistants, interacting via natural language processing. “Agentic AI marks a fundamental shift from traditional AI tools to proactive agents and teams of agents,” said Ritika Gunnar, GM of data and AI for IBM.
This means a greater need for guardrails, she added, noting that there will be proliferating “questions around accountability and control of these increasingly autonomous systems.” Plus, the rise of agentic AI “will also heighten the need to upskill employees across every discipline and leadership level so they can responsibly develop, use, and oversee agentic solutions,” Gunnar added.
AI MOVES INTO PRODUCTION
2025 will be the year organizations will “shift from experimenting with AI to implementing it for practical use cases,” said Peter Swaniker, CTO of Sand Technologies.
The rise of AI “will have implications for data management as automation for analytics, data masking, and data processing will all require enterprises to capture, analyze, and effectively maximize their data to generate actionable insights.”
To meet these needs, expect “a number of new investments in hardware, software, and technology systems, all of which need to be tested and integrated,” said Swaniker. “Platform engineering will become increasingly important as well, with software engineering organizations establishing platform teams to provide reusable services, components, and tools for application delivery.”
In addition, “Opportunities will emerge as discussions about AI evolve from discovery to application,” said Swaniker. “For instance, fresh AI permutations will inject new life into industrial AI projects that had found themselves stalled. This will open a whole spectrum of exciting possibilities for manufacturers, telecom leaders, healthcare organizations, utilities, and a number of other industries [that] choose to bring new AI innovations into their digital twins.”