Key Takeaways from the 2025 Gartner® Data & AI Summit
“AI is inevitable, but is your data ready for all AI has to offer?” That was the unspoken question every keynote, panel, and hallway conversation sought to answer at the 2025 Gartner® Data & Analytics (D&A) Summit. Gartner’s® response was loud and clear: AI can drive incredible value, but without a good data foundation, it’s garbage in, garbage out.
Every year, the Cloudera team attends the D&A summit. We exchange insights with top analysts and enterprise data leaders, participate in panels, host sessions, and engage with data practitioners at our booth. From these conversations, we know organizations are interested in AI, but they want guidance on how to make smart investments that support their current strategies and set them up for future success.
In this blog, we’ll highlight three takeaways from the summit that data leaders can use to build a solid data foundation and a future-proof data and AI strategy:
- Fuel AI-Ready Data with Metadata and Governance Tools
- Build Open Architectures with Engine Freedom
- Leverage Private Cloud AI for Sensitive Data
1. Fuel AI-Ready Data with Metadata and Governance Tools
In the keynote session, Gartner® identified data quality as the top risk D&A leaders must solve, stating that poor data availability is the biggest barrier to AI implementation. To ensure data is AI-ready, enterprise teams must align data with specific AI use cases, enforce contextual governance, and assess data qualifications continuously.
Comprehensive metadata practices are central to an organization’s AI-readiness efforts. Without unified data governance, Gartner® predicts that by 2027, 60% of companies will fail to realize the anticipated value from their AI use cases.
Cloudera empowers organizations to meet AI-readiness with a unified approach to metadata management, security, and data governance. This gives organizations better visibility, accessibility, traceability, and control over all their data, anywhere it may be, ensuring they can trust the outcomes delivered from the data. With the recent acquisition of Octopai, Cloudera enables customers to gain full visibility across the entire data ecosystem—from on-premises and cloud databases to ETL, analytics, and reporting tools—ensuring robust governance and transparency across all data touchpoints.
2. Build Open Architectures with Engine Freedom
Another critical component of an AI-ready data foundation is an open architecture. Across sessions, Gartner® emphasized that to realize the full value of AI, organizations need to follow a modular, open approach that builds trust across every layer of their data ecosystem.
The modular approach to building a tech stack requires organizations to move beyond rigid, one-size-fits-all architectures. Rather than rely on a single vendor for every need, data leaders will benefit from selecting best-of-breed tools that support diverse, modern data and AI workloads.
A modular approach achieves a balanced integration of FinOps, DataOps, and PlatformOps:
- FinOps optimizes costs and resources.
- DataOps ensures data flows smoothly and remains healthy.
- PlatformOps combines FinOps and DataOps to maintain platform performance, integration, and scalability, and drive efficiency across the entire ecosystem.
Open architecture is at the heart of the Cloudera platform, offering enterprise-scale data management without vendor lock-in. Powered by Apache Iceberg, Cloudera’s open data lakehouse uniquely supports hybrid and multi-cloud environments while offering full engine flexibility for diverse workloads across data engineering, advanced analytics, and AI. This allows you to bring the engine of choice and future proof your platform. With Cloudera Observability, customers can further monitor, optimize, and financially govern various deployments in real-time.
Data and analytics teams can create, govern, and share data products—like datasets, dashboards, and AI models—directly from Cloudera’s open data lakehouse. Zero data copies and zero ETL is key to lowering TCO while ensuring security and scalability across teams." - Jeff Healey, SVP of Product Marketing, Cloudera.
3. Leverage Private Cloud AI for Sensitive Data
Security and data governance are perennial themes at the yearly D&A summit. As AI reshapes the data landscape, discussions around these topics focus on the best methods and tools for ensuring security and governance.
This year, Gartner® highlighted the importance of private cloud AI, stating that organizations should deploy small language models (SLMs) on-premises or in private cloud environments to enhance security and compliance.
Private AI refers to the ability to use all your proprietary data to build and run AI models, applications, and agents, without data or insight being shared outside of your organization in any way. To leverage private AI, organizations must have an open foundation, the ability to leverage public and on-premises infrastructure alike, and seamless integration across the data and AI lifecycle.
Cloudera is uniquely positioned to meet this demand with Cloudera Private AI, empowering enterprise customers to build and run AI with full control and zero external exposure of sensitive data.
At the summit, our team showcased Cloudera’s new AI Inference service, which streamlines deployment of production-ready models, applications, and agents, providing ease of use and scalability, with future support for hybrid and on-premises deployments. Attendees also experienced Cloudera AI Agent Studio in action, watching AI agents come to life in under five minutes with a low-code experience.
What’s unique about Cloudera’s AI Studio is that teams can switch seamlessly from low-code to high-code. We’re all about empowering AI builders—whether they are data scientists, engineers, GenAI builders, or business analysts—to collaborate effortlessly and accelerate AI innovations with proven ROI." - Robert Hryniewicz, Director of Enterprise AI GTM, Cloudera
Data Leads the Way in the Enterprise AI Journey
As we look ahead, the convergence of AI, metadata governance, and open ecosystems presents an exciting frontier for enterprises. The insights shared at the 2025 Gartner® D&A summit resonate strongly with Cloudera’s commitment to empowering organizations to unlock the full potential of their data through secure, scalable, and flexible solutions that foster collaboration and drive AI innovation.
Learn more about how Cloudera helps customers drive AI and analytics success. Or, if you’re ready to dive in, you can try the various Cloudera tools and services mentioned here free for five days.
