Gartner, Inc., the IT practice provider, forecasts that 70 percent of organizations will change their emphasis from big to small and wide data, providing more context for analytics and reducing the data appetite of artificial intelligence (AI) by 2025.

During a virtual meet in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), the analysts at Gartner explored new data and analytics (D&A) strategies for building a resilient, adaptable and data literate enterprise for the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit 2021.

“Disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic are causing historical data that reflects past conditions to quickly become obsolete, which is breaking many production AI and machine learning (ML) models”, said Jim Hare, Vice President, Gartner.

He highlighted that human and AI decision-making has become more complex and challenging, and that deep learning approaches have become overly dependent on data.

Small and Wide data allow for more powerful analytics and AI, as Small data is a technique that needs fewer data but still yields valuable results. Certain time-series analysis techniques or few-shot learning, synthetic data or self-supervised learning are all part of the strategy.

Wide data, on the other hand, allows for the study and integration of a wide range of small and large, unstructured and organized data sources. It uses X analytics, which stands for discovering connections between data sources and a variety of data formats. Tabular, text, picture, video, audio, speech, temperature, and even smell and vibration are examples of these formats.

Further, it is estimated that demand forecasting in retail, real-time behavioral and emotional intelligence in customer service applied to hyper-personalization, and customer experience improvement are all potential fields where small and large data may be useful.

Other areas include physical security or fraud detection, as well as adaptive autonomous systems, such as robots, that soon learn by analyzing time and space correlations between events in various sensory channels.

The distinguished researcher also explained that “D&A leaders use both techniques to address issues including a lack of training data or the need to build more robust models by incorporating a broader range of data”.

Most recently, the sixth annual Chief Data Officer (CDO) study released by Gartner, reported that 72 percent of D&A executives with digital initiatives are either leading or actively participating in their organization's digital transformation initiatives.

The Gartner Data & Analytics Summit examines how to link data and analytics strategy to business results, as well as how to encourage the adoption of technologies such as AI. The Summit is currently taking place digitally in EMEA and it will be held in APAC on June 8-9, India on June 23-24, and Japan on July 12-13.