EVOLVE25: From context to outcomes and navigating the AI-driven enterprise

One of the key findings from Cloudera’s global survey report, The Evolution of AI: The State of Enterprise AI and Data Architecture, highlights how a rapidly changing enterprise AI landscape is reshaping priorities, obstacles, and goals in just 12 months.

The future of the enterprise appears clear: it is AI-driven, powered by data from everywhere. More than 1,500 IT leaders who participated in the survey cited the following technical limitations in current data architectures:

• Data integration (37%)
  
• Storage performance (17%)
  
• Compute power (17%)
  
• Data accessibility, with only 9% of organisations reporting that all of their data is available and usable for AI initiatives.

When asked about the opportunities Cloudera identified from these gaps, Chief Strategy Officer, Abhas Ricky distilled it into three core areas: data, compute-intensive workloads, and accessibility.

“We have 25 exabytes of enterprise context; so how do we make sure we build the tooling – then we can help expose that to high-fidelity users – because then the agents will be able to produce high-fidelity outputs. (Data) is the biggest opportunity for us, and the way we are going about that is in Cloudera AI with a workbench, an inferencing service, a model catalogue, a model registry, and more,” Abhas explained.

The second opportunity lies in the tokenomics around AI workloads. “Customers have told us they were able to run 400 models in production in private environments, and it would have cost them the same to use 83 models in public cloud – that is a fivefold difference to get through with that.”

This was reflected in Abhas’ Thursday keynote, which demonstrated how an incremental model deployed in public cloud leads to an exponential cost curve, whereas in private environments the cost of operating additional models tends towards zero after a certain point.

With enterprises needing to manage scalability as they deploy AI at scale, Cloudera sees itself playing an enabling role with private AI. Abhas noted, “We are probably the only vendor out there who can help you deliver private AI, meaning we help you deliver AI in any way you like – be it private cloud, public cloud, or at the edge – so that you can balance the compute requirements or balance the economic requirements to achieve scale.”

The final opportunity- accessibility – is critical. Abhas emphasised, “For large enterprises, 70% of data assets still sit on-premise. If you want to run an AI workload and your data is sitting in a different environment, you want to be able to discover the data asset, access the data asset, and then generate insights to take actions.”

Cloudera proposes to address this through its AI-powered lakehouse, which features AI-driven data cataloguing capabilities with recommendations and prompts for action. The AI-driven lakehouse also has the potential to automate and simplify data discovery, preparation, and integration, ultimately making it easier for enterprises to access and utilise their data for analytics and AI use cases.

The industry’s focus: trust and the last mile

For enterprises to successfully deploy agentic AI, Abhas stressed the importance of building trust through high-fidelity data context, explainability, and a strong focus on outcomes – the so-called last mile. The last mile is the critical final step of operationalising and integrating generative AI into existing enterprise workflows.

In essence, this stage is about bridging the gap between AI development and real business value – a step that often proves the most difficult to execute effectively.

In mid-September, Cloudera announced that it had been named a Leader in the IDC Asia/Pacific MarketScape for Unified AI Platforms 2025 vendor assessment. The research company highlighted Cloudera’s ability to deliver a comprehensive platform that integrates the latest generative AI and agentic workflows with enterprise-grade governance, security, and operational features.

(This journalist is a guest of Cloudera to their annual flagship event).