Emerging Trends in Analytics for 2025 and Beyond

Analytics Advantage is a weekly newsletter of actionable insights, proven strategies, and top tips for getting the most from your data and making high-stakes decisions with confidence. Here’s a recent sample. We hope you’ll subscribe.

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A quick note before we start:

Humans are terrible at predicting the future. There are tons of “What’s Coming in 2025” posts floating out there. Take all of them, including mine, with a healthy dose of skepticism. With that disclaimer out of the way, here’s what I see coming.

AI is the powerful force amplifying trends that have been present for years, even decades. Let’s look into what’s ahead in 2025.

Three Trends

Clean Data

Faithful readers of my missives have heard this 100 times already, but it bears repeating: clean data is the foundation for everything. AI is shining a light on how messy most data is in companies. This used to be an open secret among analysts, but now anyone with a Copilot, Cursor, or Grok can see the issues.

The years of poor data management practices are finally getting their time in the harsh spotlight of executive attention.

Before the start of the AI revolution, analysts could manually patch over gaps in messy data. Now, with AI democratizing access to insights, everyone from Phyllis in Sales to Michael the Regional Manager can see the cost of Garbage In, Garbage Out.

So, where do we go from here? Governance. Every key metric needs a single owner who’s accountable for both the metric and its underlying data. Otherwise, it’s someone else’s problem. Check your roster and you won’t find an employee named Someone Else. Assign a single person to each metric and hold that person accountable.

Unified Data Layer

This is a ten-dollar word (what can I say, I’m a consultant 🙂) describing something simple: everyone should have the data they need, when they need it.

What does that look like? Three stages of data refinement–raw, intermediate, and refined–in a single environment with default access:

• The three stages open up far more possibilities, enabling diverse paths from a single starting point.
• A single environment reduces friction. When data is scattered across multiple platforms with different access patterns, action becomes harder.
• Access by default is crucial for tackling “unknown unknowns.” The most powerful insights come from connecting disparate data.

But there’s a catch: Restrictions must exist based on laws and company policies. To avoid unnecessary barriers, assign one person to own each restriction. This eliminates the dreaded “because XYZ department said so” or “that’s just how it’s always been.”

Documentation

Documentation isn’t new, and it’s easier than ever now, thanks to AI. Feed your essential data details into AI, and let it fill in the gaps and format it for you.

Why is this critical? Documentation sets the context for AI integration. Artificial intelligence can generate insights without context, but including context increases the chances of getting accurate conclusions.

One Strategy

Experimentation

AI is an incredibly powerful tool. This is not news.

But here’s the reality: companies are struggling to effectively employ it in their operations.

The AI revolution is still in its infancy. A lot of progress has been made, but there’s much more to come, and it’s changing week by week.

Designing and evaluating focused experiments and skunkworks will yield much better results than trying to overhaul everything with AI.

From these focused experiments, a team can identify whether the gaps are from their data and documentation or from the tool. A robust evaluation also enables reporting up the chain to show how your team is staying on the cutting edge of AI adoption.

One Prediction

Okay, I will make one prediction that could be a total flop: OpenAI will get passed by other companies in the coming year.

The company appears to be a massive dumpster fire from a culture standpoint, and companies like that don’t have the staying power to keep innovating.

100% okay if I’m wrong about this.

Closing Thoughts

Change is inevitable. But the principles of how to turn your data into action are tried and true. AI is a forcing function for companies to invest in clean, accessible, and documented data in 2025. I hope yours is one of them.

From a programming standpoint, this is the last newsletter of 2024. No one should be checking their work emails after today, least of all this newsletter. I’m incredibly grateful to the dedicated core of people who read my musings week after week this year.

Look for the next issue on January 10th, 2025.

Wishing you all a restful and joyous holiday.

Shaun Davis, your personal data therapist, understands your unique challenges and helps you navigate through the data maze. With keen insight, he discerns the signal from the noise, tenaciously finding the right solutions to guide you through the ever-growing data landscape. Shaun has partnered for 10 years with top data teams to turn their data into profitable and efficiency hunting action. Learn more about Shaun.