As AI expands in 2025, enterprises must tackle data challenges and comply with evolving legislation. Most of the data experts we reached out to for our 2025 data predictions emphasised the importance of effective data management for scaling AI, unifying systems, and ensuring governance.
Zuzanna Stamirowska, CEO and co-founder, Pathway
“2025 will see enterprise AI transition from proof of concept to production, with a sharper focus on ROI. However, challenges like data management, privacy, and updates will intensify. To succeed, organisations must feed enterprise data into LLMs, ensuring models can contextualise and retrieve complex data at speed. Live AI will gain prominence, enabling smarter handling of fresh structured and unstructured data for operational success.”
Ellison Anne Williams, founder and CEO, Enveil
“While the promise of AI remains substantial, its value is rooted in an organisation’s ability to access and use rich, relevant data for evaluation and training. This core need will be abundantly clear as AI tools move from sandboxes to operational environments where the stakes are much higher.
“For cyber leaders, this will also amplify the need to ensure that data sources can be used in a manner that prioritises both security and privacy. If not, the value business and mission value delivered by AI will be unable to overcome the impact of risks it introduced.”
Andrew Beal, chief architect, Markerstudy
“AI’s explosive growth has elevated data’s importance, but most organisations’ data platforms were built for MI and reporting, not AI. While AI requires raw, unstructured data, traditional platforms aggregate and structure data, losing its unique value.
“GenAI will unlock unstructured data’s potential, turning documents, images, and videos into valuable resources and driving a need for robust data ecosystems.
“In 2025, security, governance, and ethical practices will become critical. Tools like data catalogues and tagging will ensure data is well-managed, while organisations will need frameworks to address privacy, bias, and ethical AI applications.”
Martin Brunthaler, chief technology officer and co-founder, Adverity
“Data democratisation will reach new heights, fundamentally reshaping how businesses operate. We can expect to see more brands and agencies taking steps to ensure data is easily and quickly available: empowering their teams to take full control of insights without heavily relying on IT or data engineers, so IT can establish secure, scalable systems to maintain organisational standards and focus on other strategic, more valuable initiatives.
“Features like conversational data interfaces, smart recommendations, and customisable micro-apps will become standard, making accessing and acting on data simpler and faster.
“Data democratisation will play a pivotal role in enabling business transformation at scale, helping companies to stay competitive in a rapidly changing world.”
Derek Slager, CTO and co-founder, Amperity
“Dashboards are dead – Generative AI-powered tools offering the ability to answer the questions that matter on-the-fly will be the new surface for analytics and decision making.”
Enrico Signoretti, VP of product and partnerships, Cubbit
“Unstructured data will grow steadily in 2025, making data management essential for storage and value extraction. Organisations will tackle data growth with CapEx, OpEx, and optimisation, favouring hybrid cloud and STaaS models. Advances in visibility will address challenges like data silos from hybrid and multi-cloud usage, with S3 data lakes emerging as a key solution for improved accessibility and security management.”
Chris Hall, CPO, Precisely
“Disruptive technologies like AI and cloud adoption are driving demand for simplified, trusted data access. To meet this, organisations will converge fragmented data ecosystems and adopt unified data integrity strategies across hybrid environments. Integrated data management reduces costs, ensures governance, and enables data teams with self-service access to power analytics and AI initiatives.”
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