Gartner: Top Trends Shaping Future of Data Science and Machine Learning

Gartner highlighted the top trends impacting the future of data science and machine learning (DSML) as the industry rapidly grows and evolves to meet the increasing significance of data in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly as the focus shifts towards generative AI investments.

Peter Krensky, Director Analyst at Gartner said: "As machine learning adoption continues to grow rapidly across industries, DSML is evolving from just focusing on predictive models, toward a more democratized, dynamic and data-centric discipline. This is now also fueled by the fervor around generative AI. While potential risks are emerging, so too are the many new capabilities and use cases for data scientists and their organizations."

According to Gartner, the top trends shaping the future of DSML include:

Trend 1: Cloud Data Ecosystems

Data ecosystems are moving from self-contained software or blended deployments to full cloud-native solutions. By 2024, Gartner expects 50% of new system deployments in the cloud will be based on a cohesive cloud data ecosystem rather than on manually integrated point solutions.

Gartner recommends organizations evaluate data ecosystems based on their ability to resolve distributed data challenges, as well as to access and integrate with data sources outside of their immediate environment.

Trend 2: Edge AI

Demand for Edge AI is growing to enable the processing of data at the point of creation at the edge, helping organizations to gain real-time insights, detect new patterns and meet stringent data privacy requirements. Edge AI also helps organizations improve the development, orchestration, integration and deployment of AI.

Gartner predicts that more than 55% of all data analysis by deep neural networks will occur at the point of capture in an edge system by 2025, up from less than 10% in 2021. Organizations should identify the applications, AI training and inferencing required to move to edge environments near IoT endpoints.

Trend 3: Responsible AI

Responsible AI makes AI a positive force, rather than a threat to society and to itself. It covers many aspects of making the right business and ethical choices when adopting AI that organizations often address independently, such as business and societal value, risk, trust, transparency and accountability. Gartner predicts the concentration of pretrained AI models among 1% of AI vendors by 2025 will make responsible AI a societal concern.

Gartner recommends organizations adopt a risk-proportional approach to deliver AI value and take caution when applying solutions and models. Seek assurances from vendors to ensure they are managing their risk and compliance obligations, protecting organizations from potential financial loss, legal action and reputational damage.

Trend 4: Data-Centric AI

Data-centric AI represents a shift from a model and code-centric approach to being more data focused to build better AI systems. Solutions such as AI-specific data management, synthetic data and data labeling technologies, aim to solve many data challenges, including accessibility, volume, privacy, security, complexity and scope.

The use of generative AI to create synthetic data is one area that is rapidly growing, relieving the burden of obtaining real-world data so machine learning models can be trained effectively. By 2024, Gartner predicts 60% of data for AI will be synthetic to simulate reality, future scenarios and derisk AI, up from 1% in 2021.

Trend 5: Accelerated AI Investment

Investment in AI will continue to accelerate by organizations implementing solutions, as well as by industries looking to grow through AI technologies and AI-based businesses. By the end of 2026, Gartner predicts that more than $10 billion will have been invested in AI startups that rely on foundation models — large AI models trained on huge amounts of data.

A recent Gartner poll of more than 2,500 executive leaders found that 45% reported that recent hype around ChatGPT prompted them to increase AI investments. 75% said their organization is in investigation and exploration mode with generative AI, while 19% are in pilot or production mode.

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Gartner: Top Trends Shaping Future of Data Science and Machine Learning

Gartner highlighted the top trends impacting the future of data science and machine learning (DSML) as the industry rapidly grows and evolves to meet the increasing significance of data in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly as the focus shifts towards generative AI investments.

Peter Krensky, Director Analyst at Gartner said: "As machine learning adoption continues to grow rapidly across industries, DSML is evolving from just focusing on predictive models, toward a more democratized, dynamic and data-centric discipline. This is now also fueled by the fervor around generative AI. While potential risks are emerging, so too are the many new capabilities and use cases for data scientists and their organizations."

According to Gartner, the top trends shaping the future of DSML include:

Trend 1: Cloud Data Ecosystems

Data ecosystems are moving from self-contained software or blended deployments to full cloud-native solutions. By 2024, Gartner expects 50% of new system deployments in the cloud will be based on a cohesive cloud data ecosystem rather than on manually integrated point solutions.

Gartner recommends organizations evaluate data ecosystems based on their ability to resolve distributed data challenges, as well as to access and integrate with data sources outside of their immediate environment.

Trend 2: Edge AI

Demand for Edge AI is growing to enable the processing of data at the point of creation at the edge, helping organizations to gain real-time insights, detect new patterns and meet stringent data privacy requirements. Edge AI also helps organizations improve the development, orchestration, integration and deployment of AI.

Gartner predicts that more than 55% of all data analysis by deep neural networks will occur at the point of capture in an edge system by 2025, up from less than 10% in 2021. Organizations should identify the applications, AI training and inferencing required to move to edge environments near IoT endpoints.

Trend 3: Responsible AI

Responsible AI makes AI a positive force, rather than a threat to society and to itself. It covers many aspects of making the right business and ethical choices when adopting AI that organizations often address independently, such as business and societal value, risk, trust, transparency and accountability. Gartner predicts the concentration of pretrained AI models among 1% of AI vendors by 2025 will make responsible AI a societal concern.

Gartner recommends organizations adopt a risk-proportional approach to deliver AI value and take caution when applying solutions and models. Seek assurances from vendors to ensure they are managing their risk and compliance obligations, protecting organizations from potential financial loss, legal action and reputational damage.

Trend 4: Data-Centric AI

Data-centric AI represents a shift from a model and code-centric approach to being more data focused to build better AI systems. Solutions such as AI-specific data management, synthetic data and data labeling technologies, aim to solve many data challenges, including accessibility, volume, privacy, security, complexity and scope.

The use of generative AI to create synthetic data is one area that is rapidly growing, relieving the burden of obtaining real-world data so machine learning models can be trained effectively. By 2024, Gartner predicts 60% of data for AI will be synthetic to simulate reality, future scenarios and derisk AI, up from 1% in 2021.

Trend 5: Accelerated AI Investment

Investment in AI will continue to accelerate by organizations implementing solutions, as well as by industries looking to grow through AI technologies and AI-based businesses. By the end of 2026, Gartner predicts that more than $10 billion will have been invested in AI startups that rely on foundation models — large AI models trained on huge amounts of data.

A recent Gartner poll of more than 2,500 executive leaders found that 45% reported that recent hype around ChatGPT prompted them to increase AI investments. 75% said their organization is in investigation and exploration mode with generative AI, while 19% are in pilot or production mode.

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How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Why ITOps Need Right-Sized AI, Not Bigger Models

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

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For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

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