Moving the Needle on AI Adoption, Speed to Market, and ROI
IT leaders see 5x or more ROI on data streaming investments.
cite it as a strategic or important priority for IT investment.
say data streaming platforms ease AI adoption by tackling their AI pain points.
As data streaming continues to drive impressive ROI, the report zooms in on how DSPs are emerging as a business imperative and laying the foundation for AI-powered innovation. You’ll also gain perspective on why more IT leaders see value in processing and governing data closer to its source—also known as shifting left—to enable faster, easier access to reliable data across the organization.
Why wait? Dive in to learn how IT leaders are harnessing the power of data streaming platforms to stay competitive and future-ready.
Based on our observations, the typical data streaming journey for an organization starts with evaluation or pre-production activity (Level 1) and matures up a curve, ending with data streaming broadly embedded across the enterprise (Level 5).
The 2025 report reveals that the steady data streaming investments coincide with a massive influx of data streaming adopters: 86% of IT leaders highlight investments in data streaming as a top strategic or important priority, and 25% now identify as being in Level 1, which is up from just 8% in 2024.
This increase in adoption is linked to two key factors. First, tapping into real-time data has become essential for gaining a competitive edge and has drawn a new cohort into the data streaming arena.
Second, robust data streaming platforms—coupled with flexible deployment options—are making the technology more accessible than ever.
Businesses can now benefit from real-time capabilities without the deep technical skills and extensive resources that data streaming initiatives once required.
Explore the report to see how there’s a clear correlation between data streaming adoption maturity and the achievement of higher levels of ROI.
“Where would we be without a data streaming platform? I think we’d be out of business. A data streaming platform makes it easy for us to exchange data between all our point-to-point applications, enabling us to make game-changing decisions in real time.”
“A data streaming platform allows us to stream changes as they happen, ensuring that our AI tools always provide the most relevant and timely information.”
“Real-time data streaming is foundational to delivering hyper-personalized, luxury driving experiences to our customers. MBRDNA’s Data Platform leverages Confluent to bring our teams closer to the data and accelerate innovation.”
“With a fully managed data streaming platform, we can focus on the business needs, like governance and metrics.”
“Confluent helped us shift left on our data—giving teams full ownership of their data from source to output. Now it’s clean, validated, and production-ready upstream, reducing rework and accelerating delivery.”
“A data streaming platform increases our software engineering velocity. It helps us develop better products faster and more efficiently."
“A data streaming platform enables us to project our business decisions pretty quickly rather than having to wait on data or deal with data inconsistencies. We can tap into real-time data and build a matrix out of it so that the other teams can then feed into that data to provide financial metrics, customer metrics, marketing preferences, and personalized recommendations to the customers.”
The pool of respondents spans 12 different countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom.
Survey respondents hold various strategic and leadership positions, including C-suite, directors, vice-presidents, managers, senior contributors, and senior consultants, in companies with 500 or more employees.
Respondents represent a variety of industries, including technology, financial services, government/public sector, manufacturing, healthcare, media/entertainment, non-profit, professional services, research/education, retail, transportation/logistics, travel/hospitality, and utilities/telecom.
Research done in partnership with Freeform Dynamics and Radma Research—includes responses from 4,175 IT leaders familiar with data streaming and whose experience ranges from beginner to advanced.
