Business leaders are in the midst of a data dilemma, with many feeling the pressure to prove their value and back up their position with documentation, but don’t have confidence in their own ability to use facts, metrics, and data to drive decisions. 

Fresh research from Salesforce has found that while the stakes for data-driven decision-making are rising, with more than three-quarters (76%) of business leaders under pressure to support their objectives with solid data, trust in the data that underpins these decisions is falling.

For example, confidence in data’s relevance to business objectives has fallen 18% since 2023, while confidence in its accuracy is down by more than a quarter (27%).

Business leaders are now much less confident in the reliability of their data compared to two years ago, with trust falling by 14%, alongside declines in confidence around data completeness (14%) and timeliness (7%).

This breakdown of trust is having measurable business implications, with less than half of business leaders saying their data strategies – how data is collected, managed, stored, and accessed – fully align with their business priorities, representing a significant decline since 2023.

Not only that, but it is having a direct impact on business leaders’ self-confidence in their own data literacy, with more than half (54%) not confident in their ability to find, analyse, and interpret data, despite 86% saying their careers are reliant on how data-literate they are.

In fact, 72% of business leaders feel their career trajectories are dependent on how data-driven they are, while 57% feel in competition with their colleagues to prove their value with data.

The wave of AI tools overtaking the workplace is hindering, rather than helping. More than three-quarters (76%) of business leaders – including 93% of customer service leaders, 83% of marketing leaders, and 80% of human resources leaders – say the rise of AI has accelerated the need to be data-driven.  

With business leaders left feeling like they’re drowning in data, it’s little wonder that agentic analytics built straight into workflows are becoming increasingly popular. 

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Salesforce found that almost all leaders (90%) said direct access to the data they need within the programmes and apps they work in the most would help them perform better, while 86% would use data more often if this were the case. 

Notably, the vast majority (85%) also thought they’d be better at their job if they could ask their data questions with natural language like they use with colleagues, leaving the door open for investment in data-focused AI agents.

“There is an increasing amount of pressure on business leaders to use data in today’s hyper-competitive environment,” said Southard Jones, chief product officer of analytics platform Tableau. 

“Yet, fragmented enterprise data and complex analytics tools are common obstacles leaders face that can significantly hinder confident decision-making. 

“Agentic analytics offers a solution by unifying data and empowering AI agents to proactively deliver trusted, real-time insights to everyone, enabling data-driven decisions for everyone – even those who don’t consider themselves ‘data people’.”