Highlights from the Gartner Data and Analytics Summit in Orlando, FL

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Organizations around the globe are striving to harness the power of data and analytics strategies to optimize decision-making. However, they face some stiff challenges. The rise of GenAI has added to the complexity of the digital landscape. While technological advancements offer a lot of promise for growth and innovation, there are also some concerns. 

The Gartner Data and Analytics Summit offers an opportunity for business leaders to understand how they can facilitate business innovation and drive value with data and technology. The summit will take place in six cities across the globe in 2024. The latest summit took place in Orlando, FL, this week. 

Some of the world’s top chief data analytics officers (CDAOs) and data and analytics (D&A) leaders attended the Orlando summit to share their expectations and experiences of embracing the complexity of data, analytics, and AI-driven organizations. 

The opening keynote at the summit by Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Debra Logan and VP Analyst Ehtisham Zaidi highlighted the importance of creating synergies between AI and human intelligence to help organizations achieve organizational goals. 

The summit highlighted that the key challenges faced by D&A leaders include difficulty sourcing talent, lack of data-driven innovation, incorrect use of data for decision-making, and the higher total cost of ownership (TCO) for D&A projects. 

Speaking at the summit, Rita Sallam, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, shared that “By 2027, 60% of organizations will fail to realize the anticipated value of their AI use cases due to incohesive ethical governance frameworks.”

Gartner expects CDAOs and D&A leaders to become indispensable. However, they can expect their roles to become more complex as they gain more access to data and budgets. While they still need to take ownership of foundational capabilities of data and analytics strategies, they must reinvent themselves as drivers of business innovation. If they don’t take on this new role, they might find themselves becoming irrelevant. 

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According to Sallam, “CDAOs who are successful in articulating the impact of D&A governance through the lens of value to the stakeholder are more likely to be strategically involved across the organization”. 

A key prediction at the summit was that the loss of intellectual property and copyright infringement would be a major risk and could potentially slow down GenAI adoption. While IP risk is not a new issue, the impact of this risk has grown to now affect everyone in the organization. 

Another issue that could slow down GenAI adoption is abandonment issues with LLMs. Gartner predicts that more than 50 percent of organizations that have built LLMs from scratch will abandon the models by 2028. 

Gartner predicts that 75 percent of new analytics content will be contextualized for intelligence application by GenAI by 2027 and over half of the GenAI models used by enterprises will be domain-specific.  

Gartner VP Analyst Gareth Herschel was also a distinguished speaker at the summit. He shared the top trends that address common issues and key actions to take in response. According to Gareth, organizations must think differently to embrace complexity and protect innovation time. He also recommends building financial acumen and initiating deeper levels of understanding for AI-enabled systems. 

“Data and analytics is the heart of our organizations, which means we are the single point of failure for almost everything else in our business. If our systems go down, the entire organization goes down.” Gareth Herschel, VP Analyst at Gartner. 

Sarah James, Sr Director Analyst at Gartner, spoke about key steps executive leaders can take to overcome common roadblocks. This includes establishing a dedicated change team, developing data-driven change stories, and addressing barriers to adoption by addressing engagement strategies for each group. 

To help integrate AI models with data and scale GenAI across the enterprise, Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Arun Chandrasekaran, recommended that organizations must instill robust data engineering and pilot use cases for scalability. He also recommends that enterprises must explain the outputs of the AI agents and encourage responsible use to enable seamless collaboration of humans and machines. 

The first Gartner Data and Analytics Summit of 2024 helped address some most pressing issues in the data, analytics, and AI market. It also offered solutions for some of the key challenges in the industry using data management, data architecture, and governance best practices. 

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