2021 AI, Data & Analytics Spends and Trends Report Highlights

If it isn’t evident already, the adoption and expansion of data & analytics has accelerated considerably over the last year and a half. More businesses are seeing the need for cloud services, analytics that don’t rely on their now skewed historical data, and even artificial intelligence to assist with operational efficiency.

To provide a better look into how organizations are spending money on and using data & analytics, the AI, Data & Analytics Network surveyed over 400 data leaders from multiple industries and countries. We’ll dive into a few statistics from the 2021 AI, Data & Analytics Spend + Trends annual report that we found to be interesting.

The Direction of AI and Data & Analytics

Over half of the organizations surveyed have a data strategy currently in place while 36% plan to within the next 1-5 years. This shows how important harnessing data to provide useful information is to companies everywhere. Understanding how they can better their services, knowing where they are in the market, and catching up on the competitive advantage those that already have a data strategy in place have has led to many businesses looking to adopt data tools and solutions.

When it comes to improving business processes, leaders are finding data & analytics to be a valuable and key contributor. It’s no surprise that we are seeing data being used to enable digital transformation and increase productivity with the rise of data techniques and tools such as self-service and advanced analytics.

As companies continue to recover from the impact of 2020, there seems to be an upswing in spending toward data & analytics initiatives and services. This is showing us some stability in the market and the rising need for data solutions. But exactly what solutions is this money going to be funneled to?

According to the report, the top funding priorities for organizations in the future are cloud data warehouse solutions, workflow analytics, and data integration solutions. This seems par for the course when we look at this alongside the areas that companies feel data adds the most value to.

As big cloud people, we are happy to see that 29% of respondents will be prioritizing cloud data warehousing. This top funding priority, paired with the increased data budget, could be evidence that organizations have realized this past year that their on-prem data warehousing might be more of a hindrance than a solution.

Not only are businesses looking to up their data & analytics game, but many are exploring the possibility of machine learning and artificial intelligence for their industries. Though only 24% of respondents have currently adopted ML/AI in some way, it’s exciting to see that data leaders are aware and interested in pursuing this technology. AI is still a relatively young technology that we anticipate to see more of in the future.

Overall, the 2021 AI, Data & Analytics Spend + Trends Annual Report gave us both confirmation and insight into the direction that organizations are heading with data & analytics as well as ML/AI. With 2022 fast approaching, we hope to see some of those future priorities start to come to fruition as companies begin their modernization journeys.

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