London, U.K., May 22, 2023

Gartner Data & Analytics Summit 2023 London: Day 1 Highlights

We are bringing you news and highlights from the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit, taking place this week in London, U.K. Below is a collection of the key announcements and insights coming out of the conference.

On Day 1 from the conference, we are highlighting the Gartner opening keynote presentation on leading for purpose and making an impact, the top trends for data and analytics (D&A) in 2023, and examining the benefits, risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence (AI) advancement. Be sure to check this page throughout the day for updates.

Key Announcements

Gartner Identifies 12 Actions to Improve Data Quality

Gartner Opening Keynote: Lead for Purpose. Connect With Trust. Make an Impact.

Presented by Pieter den Hamer, VP Analyst and Georgia O’Callaghan, Director Analyst, Gartner

Data and analytics (D&A) leaders can deliver increasing value to their organizations. In this session, Pieter den Hamer, VP Analyst at Gartner, and Georgia O’Callaghan, Director Analyst at Gartner, highlighted new ways for D&A leaders to connect with stakeholders, address skills shortages and lead with purpose to ensure the data-driven transformation required for success.

Key Takeaways

“The most common roadblocks to the success of D&A initiatives are all human-related challenges, such as skills shortages, lack of business engagement, difficulty accepting change and poor data literacy throughout the organization.”
“D&A leaders are still not speaking the language of business, but we’re under intense pressure to demonstrate the value of our initiatives to other business peers and executives.”
“Much of what we do in D&A is strategy enablement, which by definition plays out over a longer period of time. We need a new way to talk about investments in D&A to show future impact and how they meet the needs of multiple stakeholders.”
“Think about speaking the language of business. Now more than ever, D&A leaders must have a translation layer between their D&A initiatives and the organization’s mission-critical priorities.”
“Make business stakeholders the hero in your business value story by meeting their KPIs and enabling their objectives by connecting them with data and analytics insights.”
“Culture is the reason we say we fail. Even the highest ranking executives in your organization can’t change the whole culture, but you can change the culture around you to a data-driven one.”

Top Trends for Data and Analytics in 2023

Presented by Rita Sallam, Distinguished VP Analyst, Gartner

Top trends in data and analytics (D&A) technology and practices can help anticipate change and transform uncertainty into opportunity. In this session, Rita Sallam, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, shared how organizations can leverage these trends to drive new business growth, efficiency, resilience and innovation.

Key Takeaways

“Top trends in D&A technology and practices create new sources of value by helping organizations anticipate change and transform extreme uncertainty into new opportunities.”
The top 10 trends for D&A in 2023 are:
- Value Optimization
- Managing Your Artificial Intelligence (AI) Risk
- Data Sharing is Essential
- D&A Sustainability
- Observability
- Practical Data Fabric
- Emergent AI
- Converged and Composable Ecosystem
- Consumers Become Creators
- Humans Remain The Decision Makers
“Data observability is the ability of an organization to have a broad visibility of its data landscape and multilayer data dependencies at all times with an objective to identify, control, prevent, escalate and remediate data outages rapidly within expectable SLAs.”
“D&A and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly being used by organizations to monitor and benchmark environment, social and governance (ESG) goals and, more importantly, to improve sustainability.”
“Emergent AI enables organizations to apply AI in situations where it is not feasible today, making AI ever more pervasive and valuable.”
“Not every decision can or should be automated. Efforts to drive decision automation without considering the human role in decisions will result in a data-driven organization without conscience or consistent purpose.”

The Enterprise Implications of ChatGPT and Generative AI

Presented by Anthony Mullen, VP Analyst, Gartner

Due to their massive scale and broad use-case applicability, foundation models, such as ChatGPT, are a significant AI advancement, but the major risks they pose aren’t fully understood. In this session, Anthony Mullen, VP Analyst at Gartner, discussed the benefits, risks and opportunities of these models to tap their business value and minimize risk.

Key Takeaways

“ChatGPT (and the family of generative AI foundation models) is the first widely known AI technology that challenges the one trait humans always thought they would have over machines: creativity.”
“Although a significant advance, foundation models still require careful training, and can deliver unacceptable results due to their black-box nature.”
“Foundation models represent a huge step change in the field of AI due to their massive pre-training which makes them effective at few-shot and zero-shot learning enabling them to be versatile.”
Five best practices to implement when starting work with generative AI:
- Create a position paper outlining the benefits, risks, opportunities and deployment roadmap for foundational models’
- Choose task-specific pretrained models
- Instill responsible AI practices to prevent misuse and mitigate unintentional behavior
- Facilitate seamless machine-human interaction through UX redesign, feedback loop and education on prompt engineering.
- Designate an incubation team

It’s not too late to join the conference!

View coverage from Day 2

About Gartner

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) delivers actionable, objective insight that drives smarter decisions and stronger performance on an organization’s mission-critical priorities. To learn more, visit gartner.com.