Austin, Texas, USA, September 23, 2025

A New Futurum Survey Reveals an AI Mandate Supported by Advanced Tools and Foundational Data Readiness

The enterprise AI mandate is here, but poor data quality remains the #1 obstacle. See why leaders are now making a dual investment in advanced AI tools and foundational data quality to ensure ROI.

Key Highlights:

• AI is no longer a peripheral R&D effort but the central driver of data strategy and investment, with 29% of data teams citing “Building AI capabilities” as their single most important objective.
• “Data quality, trust, and governance” (20%) remains the biggest challenge for data professionals and also serves as the top reason AI projects fail (11%).
• Practitioners are now executing a sophisticated investment strategy with top investment priorities blending “Data platforms” (41%) and “Data quality/observability” (40%).

Overview:

Figure 1: The Dual-Track Investment: AI Ambition Fueled by Foundational Modernization

A comprehensive new survey of 839 senior data and analytics practitioners from The Futurum Group’s Futurum Intelligence reveals a dramatic shift in enterprise data intelligence, analytics, and infrastructure strategy. The research shows that building AI capabilities is now the single most important objective for companies, fueled by the anticipation of generative and agentic AI automation. However, this aggressive push toward innovation has forced a reckoning with long-standing foundational data quality and availability issues. This leads to a sophisticated dual-track investment strategy where organizations simultaneously fund AI tools and modernize the underlying data infrastructure required to succeed with AI.

“Enterprises are no longer just experimenting with AI; they are re-architecting their entire data strategy around it. However, this aggressive push has exposed a critical vulnerability, namely years of accumulated data debt,” said Brad Shimmin, Vice President and Practice Lead, Data Intelligence, Analytics, & Infrastructure at Futurum. “By the end of 2025, the primary bottleneck for scaling enterprise AI will shift from model development to data readiness. In response, most enterprises will focus on deploying an ‘AI-powered data control plane’ to automate data discovery, preparation, and governance, making it the most critical investment for unlocking value from AI workloads.”

Market trends explored in the survey include:

• The AI mandate is official. AI has shifted from experiment to core business imperative. It is the #1 objective for data teams (29%) and the #1 area for increased investment (52%), signaling a fundamental change in how enterprises plan to generate value from data.
• A forced reckoning with data quality. The rise of AI has transformed poor data quality from a persistent annoyance into an existential threat to the top business priority. The survey reveals that the biggest dissatisfaction with the current data stack is “Data quality, trust, and governance” (20%), which is also cited as a top reason for AI project failure.
• Sophisticated dual-track investment. The market has matured beyond chasing future architectural trends. While AI tools receive top billing, the following two investment priorities are “Data platforms” (41%) and “Data quality/observability” (40%). This reflects a pragmatic understanding that the AI engine cannot run without a solid, trustworthy data chassis.
• Massive move to open architectures. An overwhelming 77% of organizations are actively implementing, piloting, or strongly considering a data lakehouse architecture built on open table formats and flexible query engines. This strategic pivot aims to avoid vendor lock-in and future-proof their data stacks for the scale and complexity of AI workloads.
• The data professional is now a business innovator. The role of the data practitioner is fundamentally changing, with 73% reporting a shift toward more business-facing activities. As AI-fueled automation handles more technical work, the modern data professional is evolving into a strategic consultant tasked with bridging the gap between data assets and business impact.

These findings show that organizations remain firmly in a growth phase, with 55% planning to increase their data and analytics purchasing over the next 6-12 months. This spending is highly targeted. With 81% of respondents already using or experimenting with it for data workflows, aggressive adoption of GenAI directly forces investment back into foundational data platforms to ensure the new AI initiatives deliver a return on investment.

The full report, “1H 2025 Data Intelligence, Analytics, and Infrastructure Decision Maker Survey Report,” which includes more detailed findings and a comprehensive analysis, is available to subscribers on the Futurum Intelligence Platform. Non-subscribers can click here for inquiry and access.

About Futurum Intelligence for Market Leaders

Futurum Intelligence’s Data Intelligence, Analytics, and Infrastructure (DIAI) IQ service provides actionable insight from analysts, reports, and interactive visualization datasets, helping leaders drive their organizations through transformation and business growth. Subscribers can log into the platform at https://app.futurumgroup.com/, and non-subscribers can find additional information here.

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