What the 2026 Dresner BI Study Tells Us — and What Zoho Is Doing About It
By Sailas Sundaram, Head of Product Management, Zoho BI and Data Platforms
Dresner Advisory Services released the 17th edition of its Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study this year, and a few findings deserve a closer read. More than 90% of respondents are now actively engaged with AI in some form — either at an advanced, intermediate, or emerging level of maturity. Nearly two-thirds say AI has either accelerated or refocused their BI and analytics plans. And just over half plan to increase their BI investment in 2026 above last year's levels, with another 41% holding budgets steady. Only 7% are pulling back. That is a market that has decisively moved from deliberation to execution.
When you look at which technologies respondents ranked as most strategic across 65 BI topics, the top five — data security, data quality, data integration, reporting, and dashboards — are not new, and that is the point. Organizations aren't chasing novelty. They want BI that is reliable, trustworthy, and usable across the organization. End-user self-service sits just outside the top five, and the consolidation data makes the same point in a different way: 80% of organizations planning to consolidate their BI tools cite cost savings as the driver, but 58% also cite ease of use as a concern. People want fewer tools that work better, not more tools that promise more.
The study's treatment of agentic AI is one of its more nuanced sections. Respondents are clearly interested — executives in particular assign very high importance to AI that understands data relationships and hierarchies (scoring 4.18 out of 5) and is aware of business KPIs (3.94). But the same respondents rate autonomous action significantly lower than AI-assisted recommendation. In other words, the market wants AI that informs and suggests, not AI that acts unilaterally. That distinction matters for how BI platforms should be building AI into their products right now.
This philosophy guides our direction with Zoho Analytics. Rather than afford AI free rein, we've woven safeguards into every piece of the technology stack—governance at the foundation, a semantic layer representing encoded human judgment, visibility into AI decision-making, and more. Humans set the rules once at the foundation, and the platform keeps them informed and in control everywhere AI runs. Our work with AI also aligns with the best practices flagged by the Dresner study: AI that surfaces context, suggests next steps, and synthesizes data into actionable insights. As BI shifts from dashboards to agents, from generic AI to context-aware AI, and from closed suites to headless analytics, our direction is to be a composable AI-ready platform capable of running both pre-built and custom agents to best match customer needs.
What the 2026 Dresner study describes is a market that has grown more deliberate about what it needs from BI: reliable fundamentals, self-service access, and AI that helps people act on data rather than just producing more of it. Those are not complicated requirements, but they are harder to deliver well than they appear. The organizations that will get the most from their BI investment in the next few years are the ones that hold their tools to those standards, and choose platforms built with that bar in mind rather than platforms that arrived at it as an afterthought.
The full Dresner report can be viewed here.