Gartner, a world-leading research firm, has presented its latest data and analytics forecasts, focusing on the complexities that businesses will face as they adopt generative AI (GenAI) and defend against intellectual property (IP) loss and copyright infringement. The firm predicts that by 2026, the increasing costs to protect against IP infringement may slow GenAI adoption and lead to reduced returns.
Rita Sallam, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, explains, "As GenAI advances, regulators are rushing to keep pace. IP risk is not a new issue. However, copyright infringement risk, previously a limited risk, now affects potentially everyone in the organisation." Sallam maintains it is essential that copyright infringement risk is systematically factored into the vendor selection and governance process, and that staff are sufficiently trained on assessment tools.
Other key predictions made during the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit include a forecast that chief data and analytics officers (CDAOs) who fail to prioritise organisation-wide influence will risk their departmental roles by 2026. Simply put, Sallam underscores that "data and analytics leaders need to become indispensable and highlight the business outcomes stakeholders care about, such as data quality impact and the accuracy of personalisation models which drives higher revenue and retention."
Looking at governance in closer detail, Sallam predicts that by 2027, 40% of CDAOs will have repositioned governance as a facilitator of strategic business objectives. However, Sallam warns about neglecting ethics in AI developments: "By 2027, 60% of organisations will fail to realise the anticipated value of their AI use cases due to incohesive ethical governance frameworks."
By 2028, Gartner projects that over half of enterprises that have built their large language models (LLMs) from scratch will abandon them due to escalating costs, complexity and technical debt. The firm, however, predicts a much brighter future for GenAI tools, stating they could reduce modernisation costs by 70% by 2027.
Gartner also foresees a significant increase in GenAI use in cost optimisation measures by 2027 and an increasing prominence for GenAI-enhanced predictive analytics mechanisms offering greater financial management control. Looking slightly further back, by 2025, Gartner anticipates that the use of natural language as a primary data management application interface will exponentially increase data consumption across ecosystems.
Overall, Sallam predicts, "By 2025, 90% of current analytics content consumers will become content creators enabled by AI." In other words, as their capabilities increase, so will organisations' requirements, and this growing proficiency could eventually displace the use of traditional dashboards.