Seventy-five percent of new analytics content will be contextualized for intelligent applications through generative AI (GenAI) by 2027, facilitating a composable connection between insights and actions, as reported by Gartner, Inc.
“We’re moving from an era where analytic tools assist business professionals in making decisions, to a future where GenAI-powered analytics becomes perceptive and adaptive,” stated Georgia O’Callaghan, director, analyst at Gartner. She emphasized that this shift could facilitate dynamic and autonomous decisions, potentially transforming enterprise and consumer software, as well as business processes and models.
A Gartner survey conducted between October and December 2024, involving 403 analytics or AI leaders, revealed that over 50 percent of respondents report their organizations utilize AI tools for automated insights and natural language queries (NLG) for analytics or AI development. Despite these advancements, the static nature of current analytics often fails to deliver in a genuinely dynamic and automated manner.
Enhancing business resilience
Gartner anticipates that augmented analytics capabilities will evolve into autonomous analytics platforms by 2027, which will fully manage and execute 20 percent of business processes. The perceptive future of analytics will yield benefits by being proactive, collaborative, connected, contextual, and continuous.
“Perceptive analytics will leverage AI agents and other GenAI-driven technologies to continuously monitor evolving conditions and discern the target environment, such as market shifts, changes in customer behavior, or disruptions in the supply chain,” O’Callaghan explained.
“Guidance and analysis can then be autonomously adjusted in response, fostering a more resilient and responsive analytical infrastructure. As these capabilities emerge and are adopted by organizations, their potential to reshape business operations and drive growth will only continue to expand.”
Read more: Qatar posts 194 percent surge in GenAI enrollments, 55 percent growth in certificates
Perceptive analytics overarching risk
According to Gartner research, the primary risk associated with perceptive analytics is the overreliance on autonomous actions without adequate validation, which could lead to unintended negative consequences, reputational damage, and regulatory scrutiny.
The risk of “agent drift” poses a significant concern, where a system’s perceptions and actions gradually diverge from desired outcomes due to changing data or unforeseen interactions. Guardian agents are emerging to address this inherent issue within AI systems, as reported by Gartner. These agents are specifically designed to monitor and enforce policies and rules to ensure that the systems operate within a defined set of guardrails.
O’Callaghan suggested that developing guardian agents ought to be a central priority in new governance initiatives for data and analytics leaders, as agentic and perceptive analytics are anticipated to become the standard approach for delivering insights across platforms.
