Data Management & AI Tech Stack Trends: What Senior Buyers Are Reprioritizing For 2027

Report by Tyler Fein, Director of Research and Thomas Teravainen, Senior Analyst.

Data & AI budgets are being rewritten. AI/MLOps is pulling ahead while BI and data governance worsened on both spend and attractiveness.

This report breaks down the trends from Qualitate’s 1H ’26 Data Management & AI study, featuring 2,200+ structured discussions with senior technology buyers, benchmarked against prior studies.

Download the full report to see the full category map, vendor rankings on cost and integration, and spotlights on Snowflake, Databricks, Informatica, Collibra, and Elastic.

Five findings from the 2026 study

1. AI/MLOps is now the fastest-growing and most attractive category in the industry. Autonomous agents lead next-twelve-month spend growth as buyers move pilots into production and substitute headcount.

2. Anthropic leads forward evaluations in both LLMs and generative AI. OpenAI and Microsoft still anchor usage share. While usage reflects decisions made a year or more ago, evaluations reflect where buyers may deploy next.

3. BI & Advanced Analytics and data governance worsened on both spend and attractiveness. For BI, AI bots, summarization, and self-serve generative AI are absorbing work that dashboards, enterprise knowledge search, and analytics tools used to do.

4. Evaluations are back, but conversion is harder. More jump balls are going on across the industry, while three of five categories saw conversion rates worsen study/study. 

5. Cost-effectiveness is the industry’s weakest vendor score, at 51% average alignment vs. 74-81% on other buyer criteria. Vector databases are one exception to cost pressure: fewer than 3% of 158 experts plan to cut spend.

In buyers’ words

“We are actually seeing a decrease in the number of dashboards that my teams are building because we have deployed a lot of AI bot-related products, which can basically answer a lot of the data questions that business stakeholders have. Which means we don’t need dashboards anymore.”

– Director of Product & Growth Data Science and Analytics, IT & Telecom, Midsize Business

“I have a team of 25 people that I’ve not had to grow because of using the agents... Our turnaround is probably a 10:1 ratio on what we spend and the efficiency that it provides.”

– Director, Food & Beverage, Large Enterprise

What’s happening to BI budgets in 2026?

BI budgets are being cut because AI is absorbing the work, with data visualization tools and BI platforms showing the largest deprioritization.

The displacement runs through four channels. AI bots and agents answering data questions directly, AI summarization replacing enterprise knowledge search, seat and spend cuts to fund AI budgets, and self-serve generative AI replacing dashboard development.

Which LLM vendor leads enterprise evaluations in 2026?

Anthropic leads forward evaluations in both LLMs and generative AI, separating decisively from the field in the 1H ’26 study. OpenAI and Microsoft anchor the top tier by usage share.

Usage reflects decisions made a year or more ago. Evaluations reflect what deploys next. The report maps evaluation and usage share for every major vendor across both markets, 2H ‘25 vs. 1H ‘26.

Where is data & AI spend still accelerating in 2026?

AI/MLOps is the fastest-growing and most attractive category, led by autonomous agents as buyers move pilots into production and substitute headcount. 

Vector databases are still highly prioritized in next-twelve-month budgets. Fewer than 3% of the 158 experts we spoke with plan to decrease spend, driven by RAG architectures, expanding AI use cases, and rising embedding volumes.

What’s in the full report?

• Category spend percentile vs. attractiveness map across all five categories, 2H ’25 vs. 1H ’26
• Evaluation-to-usage rates (~26% industry average) and conversion rates (~73%) by category
• LLM and generative AI vendor evaluation vs. usage shares
• Top desired features by category, plus vendor screens on integration, compliance, and cost-effectiveness
• Company spotlights: Snowflake (Cortex traction), Databricks (governance share gains), Informatica, Collibra, Elastic
• The verbatim buyer quotes behind every metric