5 Takeaways from the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit

The 2025 Gartner Data & Analytics Summit brought together over 5000 data leaders in sunny Orlando for three days of presentations and discussion.

1 - New thinking is needed for a new moment

The opening keynote from Gartner analysts Carlie Idoine and Gareth Herschel focused on the rapid pace of change in the data world. A new approach with trust and adaptability is needed to, as Carlie said, “create adaptable sustainable, governed and trusted data ecosystems”. Data leaders can deliver this by incorporating data governance at every stage, focusing on “data readiness” and delivering data reuse instead of use cases. 

But people also need to adapt. Understanding where people are in their data journey, tailoring data literacy, and building a data culture that reinforces habits by sharing results.

Michele Dickinson’s keynote Re-wiring for the Future further explored how to help everyone adapt to change. According to Michele, there is a spectrum of reactions to change, and everyone needs different help to adapt. Exploring new approaches accessible with a sense of play can help drop barriers. And celebrating unexpected outcomes reminds everyone why we’re on this journey.

Mick Ebeling of Not Impossible Labs brought this to life with his remarkable stories of turning seemingly impossible things into real-world solutions. His mantra of commit and figure it out has let him and his team develop writing tools and accessible artificial arms that created impacts far beyond the original goals.

2 - GenAI is making a big impact on data teams

To better understand how data teams are coping with continuous change, the Prophecy team created a survey of 500 data leaders. Data teams using GenAI are already seeing big gains - with the majority seeing 31-50% efficiency gains. Interestingly, this is more than those that have yet to use GenAI were expecting. Teams were also planning to skill up to meet the moment, planning to hire more data and AI experts. Why’s that? It could be to focus on the fundamentals: data governance and faster access to data were the top categories holding back GenAI adoption. 

To dig deeper into this, we teamed up with CDO Magazine and invited a trio of data experts to share their experiences live on the Gartner stage:

• Camille Prado, CDO Magazine’s Global Editor, kicked things off declaring that GenAI is the most transformative technology in data and can we cut through the hype to see what’s possible.
  Kamal Distal, VP Data, Analytics, Platforms, and Data Science at Toyota, shared that the new energy around GenAI is the perfect time for data teams to fluid on the fundamentals and break through by bringing their efforts together. 
• Chen Yang, VP Finance and Risk Data at RBC, highlighted in regulated environments how AI can help speed up for the moment while still delivering the right answer. For Chen the rapid pace of change means focusing on strategic areas and not forgetting that this isn’t a sprint - it’s a long process. 
• Finally, Industry analyst Sanjeev Mohan added that data teams can really advance the practice and be the ones to deliver on AI.

3 - Efficiency is just the start

Picking up the GenAI impact theme, Daryl Plummer’s Keynote Riding the AI Value Chain looked at what comes after the initial efficiency gains from AI. His GenAI Value Accelerator details how changing the processes and roles with new approaches will ultimately be how organizations get value from AI. For Darryl, this could be our railroad moment: no one cares about who built more tracks or was more efficient. It’s connecting the country that changed our history.

4 -  Data integration is the hot spot

In our survey, data leaders said that data transformation was the data area most impacted by GenAI. In Thornton Craig’s standing room only session on the Data Integration Magic Quadrant, he added to this, saying that data integration was a foundational need. Fundamental to delivering data is data engineering and enabling less technical data integration. With Prophecy in the honorable mention category, the future looks bright for data transformation and data preparation - two of the critical areas of data integration.

Nina Showell’s presentation Best Practices and Technology Trends to Improve Your Data Integration Maturity added practical approaches to maximizing data integration impact. Pro Tip:  decentralize your data integration practice (while still delivering the governance you need). To explore where you might be on this journey download Gartner’s Data Integration Maturity Model. 

5 - The data community is going strong

At the Prophecy booth, we had three great full days. Our Magic Box drew a crowd during the happy hours and our demos showing self-service data preparation with the governance you need for Databricks were jam packed.

Ravit Jain brought the Ravit Show to the booth and had a chance to interview Prophecy CEO Raj Bains. Watch the full interview here and get Raj’s take on where data integration is headed and how  AI helps us bring everyone into the process of creating data pipelines.

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Kate Strachnyi also stopped by. Check out her fun interview with Prophecy co-founder Maciej Szpakowski and see firsthand how Prophecy helps everyone create data pipelines with visual and AI while leveraging the governance and scale of data cloud platforms like Databricks.

Finally, we had a chance to sit down with data leaders from industries including retail, finance, healthcare and logistics and talk about agents, AI chatbots and the future of data integration.

Thank you!

A big thank you to Gartner for putting on another great event and to everyone in the Prophecy community that made this year’s event the best yet!

To learn more about how GenAI is impacting data teams, download the Impact of GenAI on Data Teams survey here.