We live in the information age, which is marked by a volume of data generated daily that has never been seen before. This situation creates a significant obstacle for companies: the ability to extract valuable information and convert it into strategic decisions.
Therefore, business leaders face the need to gain greater agility in making data-driven decisions aligned with business objectives. Without this, they risk losing efficiency and, most importantly, the clarity needed to scale operations safely.
In this scenario, Business Intelligence (BI) emerges as the best response to this demand, organizing and converting data into actionable insights, becoming the ‘starting point’ for companies looking to structure growing and sustainable financial performance.
It’s about anticipating scenarios, defining paths, and acting with precision. Proof of this is a McKinsey study, “The Data-driven enterprise 2025”: the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning in BI enables precise analyses and generates automatic alerts about opportunities and risks.
The five BI trends
By 2025, five BI trends stand out to meet critical demands for scalability, speed, and adaptability:
- AI and automation: automated analysis, through AI algorithms, provides immediate access to reports and enables informed decisions. This is a differentiator to prevent lack of data from resulting in missed opportunities or operational inefficiency.
- Cloud scalability: cloud BI offers flexibility to increase or reduce data storage capacity according to demand. This allows handling large volumes of information without performance loss, even during peak times, and without the need for high investments in physical infrastructure.
- Democratization of access: dashboards with integrated reports enable employees across all areas to access data, making BI a ‘common language’ within the company. This not only accelerates decisions but makes them more personalized and assertive.
- Personalization for new demands: data analysis allows the creation of new Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and new strategic objectives, keeping analyzed information aligned with business priorities.
- Data governance: as regulatory norms, such as the General Data Protection Law (LGPD), become stricter, the ability to protect data to ensure compliance becomes a decisive criterion in BI usage.
BI Maturity
These trends apply to companies at different stages of maturity regarding data usage:
- Initial adoption: companies that need to establish a centralized data environment for reliable reports. Their challenges are low data literacy and lack of governance processes. The benefits of BI are greater data visibility and reduced time in generating reports.
- Strategic expansion: companies that already use BI for reports and analyses but have yet to explore its strategic potential. Their challenges are connecting BI to strategic planning, adopting predictive analytics, and integrating multiple data sources. The benefits of BI are improved decision-making, cost reduction, and process optimization.
- Full maturity: companies that already have BI widely disseminated and integrated into business strategy. Their challenges are scaling BI usage, ensuring data quality, and automating analytical processes. The benefits of BI are real-time decisions, constant innovation, and greater operational efficiency.
Regardless of maturity level, BI is essential to reinforce the importance of a data-driven corporate environment (what we also call a ‘culture data-driven‘).
Therefore, in 2025, scaling operations will mean, above all, scaling intelligence: more than extracting data, it’s necessary to master it, contextualize it, and transform it into strategy.
If the combination of robust technology and strategic expertise is the differentiator for a more solid and competitive future for companies, BI is the ‘point of no return’ for companies to explore new markets without losing control of the core business.
