Your guide to 2024 data and analytics megatrends

2024 megatrends in data and analytics

Data and analytics technology is moving faster than ever. Artificial Intelligence, from traditional AI and ML to GenAI, is supercharging innovation. And with new ways to infuse analytics into users’ experiences using composability, there’s never been a better time to be in the driver’s seat on analytics delivery.

At Sisense, we’ve always looked to make it simple for analytics leaders to embrace the latest in emerging technology and capture the value first, before their competitors. It’s about looking to the future, separating the real value from the hype, and being the first to market in innovating around major tech shifts—so our customers get a first-mover advantage in applying the best analytics innovations to their own roadmaps and users.

For example, last year we unveiled Compose SDK that provides provides the first built-from-the-ground-up composable development toolkit for product and engineering teams to build analytics-powered applications headlessly using the latest TypeScript, and the latest web frameworks like React, Angular, or Vue. In a nutshell, it’s composable development for analytics teams. The value isn’t only about enabling product teams to accelerate their time to market, but it’s also about ensuring that infusing analytics into your application doesn’t come at the cost of user experience.

And of course, product and engineering teams are looking to capitalize on the rapid emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI. Analytics teams are looking for concrete, secure, and scalable ways to take advantage of the technology and drive value to their users. That’s why we introduced our GenAI Analytics Chatbot (Beta), which provides a composable way for engineering teams to add conversational experiences centered around data and analytics into directly their products and apps, so their users can make better decisions faster and take action more confidently.

Our simple focus is to enable our customers to stay ahead of the game, and embrace and apply the best, most value-driving emerging technologies.

Your guide to embracing emerging analytics technologies

But how do you know if you’re really surfing the right emerging technology trends, with so many technologies competing for your attention? How do you separate the wheat from the chaff?

Upon reading the Gartner “Emerging Tech Impact Radar: Data and Analytics” report, we learned more about the sheer amount of technologies in play. As per our understanding, the report identifies 29 technologies, which is almost dizzying, and certainly some are nearer term than others, and with varying degrees of mass. And it pays to have a full radar at hand so you can plan your roadmap effectively, where to focus now, and where to head next, to predict and prepare for a wave of analytics innovation.

Knowing all the emerging technologies out there is important, but as an analytics leader, you need to distill it down to the major technologies that will have the biggest impact, so you can place the right bets that are best positioned to deliver the most powerful value.

Fortunately, the report sums up this vast array of emerging technologies it into a more digestible handful of overarching themes, which include Composable Data and Analytics, and Generative Decisions and Actions.

It’s why we and our customers are excited to see the emerging macro-trends that Gartner sees occurring in the market intersecting so clearly with what Sisense is delivering today around composable development and generative conversational analytics. It’s not by accident, because as we’ve spoken with so many of our partners, customers, and other analytics leaders, we hear consistently that AI is affecting every aspect of the analytics process, and composable development is now becoming the standard delivery model.

Generative decisions and actions: The time is now to build AI into every analytics process

At Sisense, we see generative AI opening up powerful avenues to expand reach to include more users by providing augmented analytics that promises a natural, contextual experience and lowers the learning bar to adoption. The timing has never been more critical, with BI penetration in organizations standing relatively unchanged at around 30%, which means there is significant whitespace for analytics delivery teams.

Advancements in augmented analytics provide a range of opportunities. For example, analytics chatbots can enable end-users to explore using highly sophisticated Natural Language-based conversations. The scope can include everything from exploring the data model to asking analytical questions, to providing data storytelling and narratives to interpret results.

It’s why Gartner identifies Generative Decisions and Action is a significant theme. Augmented analytics sits front and center in Gartner’s Emerging Tech Impact Radar. Net-net, the AI wave, will touch every aspect of analytics, from how we prepare data to how we consume it. It’s why data and analytics teams are evaluating how to incorporate the next generation of augmentation in their near-term roadmaps.

Gartner notes, “Decision augmentation emerges from the confluence of analytics and business intelligence, data science and AI, decision management suites and a host of other surrounding analytics technologies.”

As we look forward, the opportunity shifts further into prescriptive analytics, with the promise of augmented analytics providing recommendations to end-users on how to act by fusing traditional Machine Learning with LLM-based models.

However, we believe development teams must ensure that augmented analytics is firmly rooted in an underlying data model and semantic layer to ensure that expanding reach doesn’t come at the cost of the integrity of results. This foundation should include defining metrics, facts, fields, tables, and dimensions, ensuring consistent terminology and query execution. Ultimately, it’s about providing guardrails and auditability.

Critically though, to ensure adoption and success, when considering how to provide augmented analytics, teams must put user experience front and center. After all, it’s hardly augmented if a completely different look and feel of the chat experience is out of context and separate from the end-user workflow.

No surprise then, that in the report, Gartner notes the need to focus on the overall experience as a recommendation for teams to “Prioritize user experience and personalization for diverse user personas beyond the traditional analytics developers by leveraging the generative AI and composable D&A to democratize analytics further.”

Composable data and analytics are now key to no-compromise agility

If you’re unfamiliar with composability, it’s now a critical method for teams to assemble analytical applications and experiences from API-centric components and web frameworks.

Traditionally, analytics teams have often faced a major challenge to infuse analytics into their users’ workflows. They faced two painful choices, either build from the ground up, which usually takes a vast amount of time and developer resources, not to mention the long tail of maintenance that comes with it. Or they have had to “force-fit” a heavy-weight, off-the-shelf analytics platform into an app to get it to market faster, which traditionally has meant compromising the user experience, ending up with what their users see as “frankensoftware.”

In contrast, composable analytics development enables the creation of agile and adaptable analytics solutions, where different components or modules can be combined to meet specific requirements. This approach allows for faster development and deployment of analytics applications without the user experience compromise.

We built Compose SDK to provide the industry’s first analytics toolkit built solely around the concept of composability, modularity, and optionally fully headless development. It’s already seeing incredible interest from analytics teams, who can build code-first, using all the technologies they are familiar with, including TypeScript, Node, React, Vue.js, and Angular.js.

Compose SDK’s modular components, provide the composability full-spectrum, including visualizations based around the latest web frameworks, headless data query to plug and play third-party charting or simply infuse data into your product, and a broad range of other objects and components, including our composable GenAI chatbot.. We believe, if you’re looking to add analytics to your app, quickly without compromise, there is no better way than full-leaded composable development.

It’s our understanding that the Gartner report echos the same major theme, identifying composable data and analytics as a key theme with speed being a major value driver, observing that “Fast-paced innovation is the key output of a composable D&A architecture.”

But while speed of delivery is a crucial benefit, it’s also about being an enabler to add analytics that deliver differentiated value, with Gartner finding that “Composable D&A maximizes the ability to build, assemble, and reassemble business capabilities at an exponentially faster pace than building custom enterprise applications from the ground up. It also enables assembled applications that can differentiate a company, which may not be the case with prepackaged applications.”

Get all the latest trends in Gartner’s emerging tech report

At Sisense, we know there has never been a more exciting time to be an analytics practitioner due to the vast amount of data, new database options, and rapidly evolving technologies available to analyze it, all fueled by the rise of GenAI. Additionally, with the emergence of composable analytics development and conversational analytics approaches, analytics solutions are becoming more agile, flexible, and customizable.

This shift presents compelling opportunities for analytics professionals to embed and deliver innovative solutions to help their customers and users make data-driven decisions, improve operations, and drive business growth. But you’ve got to tap in the right technologies and trends to deliver the maximum value.

To learn all the trends in the D&A market, download “Emerging Tech Impact Radar: Data and Analytics.”