The past 12 months saw breakneck developments in how firms applied artificial intelligence. AI began to change from a mere tool to an integral part of capital markets operations. The year also saw data services providers launch multiple products for the growing private markets investment sector. Data Management Insight spoke to leaders in our industry to get their take on the most important changes of 2025. In the new year we will look at their predictions for 2026.
1. Artificial Intelligence
- AI evolved from a tool you prompt to becoming a semi-autonomous coworker capable of planning and executing multi-step tasks – we’ve started shifting from asking to delegating. Agentic capability is now a marquee feature of frontier models, and early adopters in finance and government are piloting orchestrated workflows where humans and AI agents collaborate.
– Alexandra Mihailescu Cichon, Chief Commercial Officer, RepRisk
2. Private Markets
- The most striking shift has been the real, practical use of AI across private markets. After a decade of talk and tentative pilots, 2025 has been the year firms finally put it to work. A revival in dealmaking and a broader wave of investor activity created the perfect test case, and AI delivered. For a part of the industry known for limited visibility and sluggish reporting, it marked the first time technology genuinely started to close the gap. The sheer volume and variety of data now flowing through private markets makes manual processing impossible. More documents, more valuation inputs, more noise, and more mismatches in timing have pushed firms toward machine-learning tools that can sift, structure, and reconcile information at scale. AI is becoming the backbone for portfolio-wide data standards, joined-up analytics, and reliable insight that spans both public and private assets.
– Clément Miglietti, Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer, NeoXam.
3. Data Governance, Lineage and Quality
- With the continued rise of AI, 2025 underscored a decisive industry shift toward prioritising trusted, high-quality and explainable data as a true competitive advantage. Models are only as strong as the data that powers them, and reliability, governance, and deep domain context are now central to firms’ success. We’ve seen firms streamline their data environments, consolidating data providers to reduce complexity and increase operational efficiency. Providers who can deliver interoperable data at scale and across cloud environments are pulling ahead.
– Leila Sadiq, Global Head of Enterprise Data Content at Bloomberg
- Data management has increasingly become even more critical in the age of AI-ready data, where the fuel for the next generation of use-cases is high quality, metadata-rich and meticulously managed data.
– Abhishek Tomar, Head of Data – Enterprise Data Organisation, S&P Global
- The private earth-intelligence sector surged as public climate-science pullbacks in the US fuelled demand for satellite and AI-powered risk analytics – from flooding and wildfire to methane emissions. At the same time, models that fuse geospatial data with AI began to go mainstream, turning satellite imagery into clear, real-time risk insights. Companies accelerated efforts to centralise data and establish a “single source of truth,” selecting core datasets across divisions. The Chief Data Officer now carries a clear mandate: make data AI-ready, governed, trusted, and secure. Yet ambition still outpaces readiness – AI strategies are moving faster than the harmonisation required to support them, driving renewed investment in data integration and governance.
– Alexandra Mihailescu Cichon, Chief Commercial Officer, RepRisk
- Data requirements evolve constantly. Success depends on a holistic data management approach backed by strong governance. This means consolidating all investment information in one place – moving away from data silos toward a unified data layer. We are observing that buy-side firms are increasingly focused on quantifying returns from data investments and demonstrating clear value from transformation projects. This shift reflects a compelling business case: data strategies must support financial goals and drive better decision-making. As a result, many firms are investing in holistic data platforms that better serve business users and improve client outcomes.
– Ulrik Modigh, Head of Managed Business Service, SimCorp.
- Data, both real-time and historical, is more important than ever as firms look to integrate AI into their workflows. In a survey conducted in collaboration with Coalition Greenwich earlier this year, we found that 80% of respondents expect AI to become one of the main use cases of data. There are also extra demands on existing data with three out of four buy-side firms were looking for more granular historical tick data sets which can be essential in training those models.
The demand for data is sustained and reflected in the growth of the budget, where almost 70% of firms said they would increase their data spend between 1% to 5%. The top of mind for firms is data quality from trusted sources for AI use. They also expect increased investment in data with 70% of firms stating they would increase their data spend between 1% to 5% in 2026.”
– Matthew Nurse, Head Market Data, Financial Information, SIX
4. Sustainability
- While the language around sustainability has evolved – less about morals and more about materiality; less about compliance and more about competitiveness; less about harm reduction and more about redesigning how value is created – the underlying drivers have barely changed. That’s because the core issues remain the same: biodiversity, human and labor rights, governance, and supply chain resilience.
The fundamentals haven’t shifted. The rhetoric may change, but the risks don’t. Business conduct risks continue to translate into operational, reputational, and financial exposure. At the end of the day – regardless of the terminology – capital deployment is about managing risk and capturing opportunity. Sustainability plays a role both.
– Alexandra Mihailescu Cichon, Chief Commercial Officer, RepRisk
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