Our Top Data and Analytics Predicts for 2021

Predicts 2021: Data and Analytics Leaders Are Poised for Success but Risk an Uncertain Future:

• By 2023, 50% of chief digital officers in enterprises without a chief data officer (CDO) will need to become the de facto CDO to succeed.
• By 2024, widespread adoption of cloud will raise the CFO’s influence over the chief data officer’s (CDO) decisions due to explicit linkage of workloads to cost, bringing disruption to the CDO role.
• By 2024, 75% of organizations will have established a centralized data and analytics (D&A) center of excellence to support federated D&A initiatives and prevent enterprise failure.
• By 2023, organizations with shared ontology, semantics, governance and stewardship processes to enable interenterprise data sharing will outperform those that don’t.
• Through 2023, title inflation will drive 50% of chief data officer (CDO) appointments, leading to the CDO being an internal service, rather than a strategic business peer.

Predicts 2021: Data and Analytics Strategies to Govern, Scale and Transform Digital Business:

• By 2024, 30% of organizations will invest in data and analytics governance platforms, thus increasing the business impact of trusted insights and new efficiencies.
• By 2024, most organizations will attempt trust-based data sharing programs, but only 15% will succeed and outperform their peers on most business metrics.
• By 2024, 60% of the data used for the development of AI and analytics solutions will be synthetically generated.
• By 2025, 80% of data and analytics governance initiatives focused on business outcomes, rather than data standards, will be considered essential business capabilities.
• Through 2025, 80% of organizations seeking to scale digital business will fail because they do not take a modern approach to data and analytics governance.

Predicts 2021: Artificial Intelligence in Enterprise Applications:

• By 2024, the degree of manual effort required for the contract review process will be halved in enterprises that adopt advanced contract analytics solutions.
• By 2023, three-quarters of HR service management inquiries will be initiated through conversational platforms.
• By 2024, 10% of digital commerce orders will be predicted and initiated by AI.
• By 2023, ERP data will be the basis for 30% of AI-generated predictive analyses and forecasts.
• Through 2023, up to 10% of AI training data will be poisoned by benign or malicious actors.

Predicts 2021: Analytics, BI and Data Science Solutions — Pervasive, Democratized and Composable:

• By 2023, 30% of organizations will harness the collective intelligence of their analytics communities, outperforming competitors that rely solely on centralized analytics or self-service.
• By 2023, 60% of organizations will compose components from three or more analytics solutions to build business applications infused with analytics that connect insights to actions.
• By 2023, overall analytics adoption will increase from 35% to 50%, driven by vertical- and domain-specific augmented analytics solutions.
• By 2023, cloud architects will become key stakeholders when purchasing analytics and BI tools, as scalability and cohesive cloud ecosystems move into the top 3 key buying considerations.

Predicts 2021: Artificial Intelligence and Its Impact on People and Society:

• By 2025, the concentration of pretrained AI models among 1% of AI vendors will make responsible AI a societal concern.
• In 2023, 20% of successful account takeover attacks will use deepfakes to socially engineer users to turn over sensitive data or move money into criminal accounts.
• By 2024, 60% of AI providers will include a means to mitigate possible harm as part of their technologies.
• By 2025, 10% of governments will use a synthetic population with realistic behavior patterns to train AI while avoiding privacy and security concerns.
• By 2025, 75% of conversations at work will be recorded and analyzed, enabling the discovery of added organizational value and risk.

Predicts 2021: Data Management Solutions — Operational Efficiency Rises to the Top:

• By 2025, 50% of independent database management system (DBMS) vendors will cease operations, causing customers to adjust strategies and migrate back to their strategic DBMS suppliers.
• By 2024, organizations that utilize active metadata to enrich and deliver a dynamic data fabric will reduce time to integrated data delivery by 50% and improve the productivity of data teams by 20%.
• By 2024, 75% of organizations will have deployed multiple data hubs to drive mission-critical data and analytics sharing and governance.
• Through 2024, 50% of organizations will adopt modern data quality solutions to better support their digital business initiatives.

Predicts 2021: Operational AI Infrastructure and Enabling AI Orchestration Platforms:

• By 2025, 50% of enterprises will have devised artificial intelligence (AI) orchestration platforms to operationalize AI, up from fewer than 10% in 2020.
• By 2025, AI will be the top category driving infrastructure decisions, due to the maturation of the AI market, resulting in a tenfold growth in compute requirements.
• By 2025, 50% of enterprises implementing AI orchestration platforms will use open-source technologies, alongside proprietary vendor offerings, to deliver state-of-the-art AI capabilities.

Predicts 2021: Artificial Intelligence Core Technologies:

• By 2023, organizations that scale graph techniques will deliver five times more AI models, for multiple use cases, into production than those that don’t.
• By 2024, 70% of enterprises will use cloud and cloud-based AI infrastructure to operationalize AI, thereby significantly alleviating concerns about integration and upscaling.
• By 2024, use of synthetic data and transfer learning will halve the volume of real data needed for machine learning.

FYI some of these were picked up by Forbes: 54 Predictions About The State Of Data In 2021.