Get your data questions answered by a leading expert. Executives who rely on data analytics face a squeeze from two directions. On one hand, analytics continues to be ever more important in making business decisions – if you're not getting the most from your analytics solution, you're likely falling behind. Yet on the other hand, data analytics continually grows more complex, as advances in software and methodology enables greater insight, but also greater operational challenge. To shed light on the rapidly growing data analytics sector, I'll speak with two leading experts: Andi Mann, Chief Technology Advocate at Splunk, and Bill Schmarzo, CTO, IoT and Analytics, Hitachi Vantara.

Whit Andrews, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, was able to put some hard numbers to the trend. "We are in the very earliest stages of enterprise adoption of artificial intelligence," he said. "Specifically, in our most recent CIO survey from 2017, one in 25 CIOs described themselves as having artificial intelligence in action in their organizations." The companies farthest along with the technology tend to be technology giants, said Hadley Reynolds, managing director and co-founder of the Cognitive Computing Consortium. These companies are "basing much of their businesses on various kinds of machine learning and deep learning technologies," he said, so they have invested heavily in research and recruiting talent with AI skills.