Top 3 Data and Analytics Trends to Prepare for in 2025

2025 is poised to be another year of significant advancements in business intelligence (BI) and analytics. Building on the momentum of 2024, which saw a surge in self-service BI adoption, our attention turns to newer, sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) solutions.

As the data landscape evolves, it’s important to keep agile and adapt to emerging technologies to stay competitive and maximize the value of your analytics investments. 

In this article, we’ll delve into 2025’s top data analytics trends, as well as provide free resources you can leverage to get up-to-speed and prepare. If you missed this year’s trends, you can catch up on the top 3 data and analytics trends in 2024.

Trend #1 - Opening up data and insights for everyone via Augmented Analytics

Opening up data access and analysis capability to everyone, regardless of technical expertise, is a recurring objective among businesses adopting modern BI solutions today. 

Thanks to the continuing development and integration of multiple transformative technologies into our analytics solutions, including automated business monitoring (ABM), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and natural language technologies (including NLP, NLG and NLQ), the concepts of data democratization and self-service analytics are becoming more of a reality. 

Data democratization is the main promise of augmented analytics, also referred to as AI analytics. Augmented analytics combines automation and AI technologies and deploys them within BI and analytics solutions to streamline the analysis process - data preparation, discovery, insight generation and insight explanation - for all end-users. It also uses these technologies to better understand user intent, and recommend appropriate data sources and best practices. 

The purpose of augmented analytics is to break down data silos and empower a wider range of people to contribute and use the BI and analytics tools your business invests in for data-driven decision-making, rather than continue to rely on IT to explain the results for them. This new class of modern data user, enabled by AI and automation, is called the augmented consumer.

Yellowfin predicts augmented analytics will continue to be a dominant force in 2025, empowering data experts and regular business people alike with the latest AI-powered tools to automate tedious tasks like data preparation and data visualization, and allow both types of analytics users to more easily access their data, get to the analysis stage faster, focus on asking the right questions and interpreting results more accurately. Advisory firms such as Gartner expect 90% of current analytics content consumers to become content creators enabled by AI-powered tools, offered by their BI solutions, by the end of 2025, while AI enterprise surveys have found 79% of corporate strategists see AI and analytics as critical for success over the next two years. The global augmented analytics market size is also expected to reach $29.8 million by 2025.

While augmented analytics is still evolving, certain BI vendors offer exclusive AA tools as part of their solutions suite. Yellowfin, for example, leverages AI and automation to provide powerful AA tools to its end-users, including our Assisted Insights, Guided NLQ and Signals products. These features streamline data processes and significantly simplify analysis for both basic and advanced users. Basic users can leverage them for straightforward analytics, while advanced users (analysts) can use them as a fast foundation for more complex and in-depth analysis.

The integration of augmented analytics tools, such as Yellowfin’s exclusive feature-set into your data analytics process, offers several key advantages, including:

Accelerated insights and reduced errors: AI-powered data query tools like Guided NLQ enable users to quickly and accurately access insights through natural language queries, minimizing the risk of human error.

Proactive decision-making: Automated analytics and monitoring tools like Signals proactively identifies anomalies and trends in your data, empowering the entire organization to anticipate future outcomes and make informed decisions.

Uncovering hidden insights: Tools like Assisted Insights which leverage machine learning to uncover hidden patterns and relationships within data can help more people quickly access AI-generated explanations and comparisons of the results, and lead your end-users to more comprehensive and actionable insights.

In addition to Yellowfin's extensive in-built AI analysis tools, we also offer AI chatbot assistants, Ask Yellowfin and Code Assistant, to help guide your end-users through Yellowfin documentation and to generate code snippets, respectively.

Yellowfin augmented analytics content resources

Check the essentials: What is Augmented Analytics?

Download free whitepaper: Embedding AI-Powered Analytics Into Your App

Get free tips: Embedding AI-Powered Analytics Into Your App

Learn the benefits: From AI to BI: Navigating ML Implementation with Yellowfin (free on-demand webinar)

Trend #2 - Taming the data deluge with data governance

While the allure of powerful analytics solutions is undeniable, unlocking their true potential hinges on a critical but often overlooked aspect – data governance. In 2025, organizations seeking to leverage BI for strategic decision-making will find data governance a key pillar for success.

What data governance is comes down to a structured framework to guide the management of your organization's data assets and the linking of data and analytics to targeted and quantified business outcomes and metrics. This same framework specifies the accountability, ownership and decision rights to ensure data accuracy, control, consistency, and security across the entire data lifecycle, from collection to analysis. While important, it is often overlooked as an initiative.

Without proper data governance, valuable insights can be obscured by errors, inconsistencies, and duplicate information. You may not empower the right people in the business to help ensure data and analytics is utilized correctly without it. This is particularly true in the age of big data, where vast amounts of information flow through various systems, and with the upcoming EU AI Act in February 2025, having a standardized framework in place is key to avoid non-compliance.

The rapidly rising importance of data governance in 2025 also ties in with the adjacent trend of augmented analytics, as Gartner expects 60% of organizations will fail to realize the value of their AI analytics use cases with augmented analytics solutions due to incohesive data governance frameworks, while Forrester predicts 40% of enterprises will combine data and AI governance in 2025. If you weren’t prioritizing governance before, now is the time to do so.

To establish a strong data governance framework, many businesses opt to select a BI vendor equipped with advanced data governance and control tools built into the solution that help standardize the data governance framework you put in place throughout the organization. 

Having a BI tool that specializes in governance assists to better centralize data, maintain its quality, and ensure its availability. For instance, Yellowfin provides an administration console for centralized control over data sources, users, and data usage, to better optimize BI environments and manage deployments. Yellowfin features, like Content Folders, help facilitate governance over content by ensuring the right groups and users get access to the right data they have access to, while Yellowfin’s data preparation module enables the building of a meta-data layer to clean data to ensure it is trustworthy and accurate, and create new content in a secure way.

Yellowfin data governance content resources

Check the essentials: What is Data Governance? Accountability and Quality Control in BI

Download free Whitepaper: Governed Data Discovery: A Best Practices Guide

Learn the benefits: Data Governance and Data Security in an Analytics Environment (On-Demand Webinar)

Trend #3 - Fostering data-driven cultures for better data literacy

To truly unlock the full potential of what augmented analytics and data governance bring, you need a workforce that is equipped to understand, interpret, and leverage the insights they generate. This is where data literacy becomes the cornerstone of a data-driven future.

Fostering a data culture to improve data literacy is expected by several advisory firms to become an essential driver for organizational success. Forrester Research expects 70% of employees to work heavily with data by 2025, up from 40% in 2018. For that to become a reality, you need to get your organization up-to-speed on not just the analytics tools you have invested in for them, but how to use them, and why data and analytics in general are critical components for work.

Data literacy goes beyond basic data analysis skills. It's about proactively fostering a culture where everyone, from executives to front-line employees, can confidently translate data into actionable insights. This empowers informed decision-making at all levels, aligning actions with strategic goals. If augmented analytics tools are designed to streamline the process of data analysis for more people, then think of data literacy as the precursor - it’s the effort and training you put in to help your analytics users become knowledgeable and feel confident about using it.

In the lead up to 2025, consider investing in initiatives that focus on promoting data collaboration and literacy, such as training workshops and mentorship programs, and opting to explore BI solutions that provide in-built features that offer a range of features designed to align with and promote data literacy and data-driven insights.

For instance, Yellowfin’s data storytelling component, Stories and Present, allows users to create engaging, interactive narratives from data, making complex insights accessible to a wider audience. In addition, Yellowfin's Guided Natural Language Query (NLQ) enables users to ask questions in plain English and receive accurate, relevant answers without requiring extensive technical expertise.

By combining these features, Yellowfin aims to empower your business to cultivate a data-literate workforce and drive data-driven decision-making across the board.

Yellowfin data literacy content resources

Check the essentials: Getting Data Ready for Analytics - A Yellowfin Walkthrough

Download free whitepaper: The Ultimate Guide to Modern Self-Service Analytics

Learn the benefits: Cultivate a Data Culture For Analytics Success (free whitepaper)

Yellowfin BI: A leading analytics solution for 2025

By addressing the latest data and analytics trends, your business can be better prepared to ensure data is more accessible to everyone, more users are empowered by your BI tools to analyze critical metrics, and that there is a structured, secure framework in place.

Yellowfin is one of the only embedded BI solutions on the market that provides exclusive features that align with augmented analytics, data governance and data literacy.

By exploring how we can align with your unique business use cases, you can begin to unlock AI-powered insights (augmented analytics), keep data secure and reliable (data governance) and foster a data-driven culture (data literacy) to help your users make more informed decisions, improve operational efficiency, and gain a competitive advantage.