Top 5 analytics trends for 2026

In 2026, business users, frontline workers, and end customers all expect analytics access. What was once relegated to specialized analyst teams is now finding its way into every internal department and increasingly into the products and services organizations deliver to end users. Customers’ growing expectations reflect this shift. Its driven increasing demand for platforms that bring data preparation, governance, visualization, and conversational capabilities into unified environments to enable AI-led experiences. Furthermore, conversational interfaces are becoming expected functionality as organizations remove technical barriers to insight discovery. For investment and financial teams, these integrated capabilities represent the new baseline for analytics platforms and have substantiated several trends we see in our customer interactions. To best fit analytics demands throughout the year to come, platform decisions and reassessments of existing deployments should reflect these demands and consider the trends they inform.