Companies are becoming overloaded with data and many lack the resources and tools to efficiently make use of it. It’s possible that some emerging technologies could ease the struggles businesses have with analytics.

In an April 2018 survey of 500 analytics and business intelligence professionals worldwide conducted by MicroStrategy, 24% of respondents said that cloud computing is the technology that is most likely to impact their analytics initiatives over the next five years. This was followed by one-fifth of respondents who cited big data and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

For marketers, outdated technology often stands in the way of getting insights on customers in real time. In a July 2018 survey of 560 marketing professionals worldwide conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, 36% of respondents said that legacy systems were one of the biggest roadblocks preventing them from implementing real-time analytics. A third of respondents also reported that data silos stifled their progress.

Improving analytics is crucial for marketers who want to upgrade their customer experience.

According to a February 2018 Econsultancy and Adobe survey of 12,795 client-side marketers worldwide, 65% of respondents said improving their data analysis is a very important factor in delivering a better customer experience. That was the most popular answer for the second year in a row, up 2 percentage points from 2017.