The future of predictive analytics with GenAI: Gartner

Businesses are moving away from the era where analytic tools help people make decisions, towards a future where generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered analytics become perceptive and adaptive. 

Gartner predicted 75 per cent of new analytics content will be contextualised for intelligent applications through generative AI by 2027, enabling composable connection between insights and actions.

“This will enable dynamic and autonomous decisions that have the potential to transform enterprise and consumer software, business processes and models,” said Gartner director analyst Georgia O’Callaghan at the Gartner Data and Analytics Summit in Sydney this week.

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However, AI leaders report that their organisations use AI tools for automated insights and natural language queries said Gartner. Even the static nature of current analytics often falls short of delivering in a truly dynamic and automated fashion.

The analyst firm also predicts, augmented analytics capabilities will evolve into autonomous analytics platforms by 2027, which will fully manage and execute 20 per cent of business processes.

The perceptive future of analytics will deliver benefits by being proactive, collaborative, connected, contextual and continuous.

O’Callaghan explained that perceptive analytics will use AI agents and other genAI-fuelled technologies to continuously monitor evolving conditions.

It will be able to also perceive the target environment, such as market shifts, customer behaviour changes or supply chain disruptions.

“Guidance and analysis can then be autonomously adjusted in response, creating a more resilient and responsive analytical infrastructure,” she said. “As these capabilities emerge and be adopted by organisations, their potential to reshape business operations and drive growth will only continue to expand.”

This doesn’t come without challenges. According to Gartner research, the overarching risk with perceptive analytics is the over-reliance on autonomous actions without sufficient validation.

This could have unintended negative consequences, reputational damage and regulatory scrutiny.

The risk of “agent drift” is a serious concern, where a system’s perceptions and actions gradually deviate from desired outcomes due to evolving data or unforeseen interactions. 

Guardian agents are emerging to deal with this inherent issue in AI systems, said Gartner.

These agents are specifically tasked with monitoring and enforcing policies and rules to ensure the systems operate within a set of guardrails.

“Building guardian agents will need to be a key focal point of new governance initiatives for data and analytics leaders, as agentic and perceptive analytics become the standard way of insight delivery across platforms,” said O’Callaghan.

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