AI has a data problem. As organisations race to deploy ever more sophisticated AI systems, they’ re running headlong into constraints that threaten to derail their ambitions: scarce high-quality datasets, stringent privacy regulations and the spiralling costs of data collection and curation.
The solution may lie not in finding more real-world data, but in manufacturing it entirely.
Synthetic data – artificially generated information that mimics real-world patterns without containing actual personal details – is rapidly becoming the industry’ s answer to these challenges. Gartner predicts that by 2024, 60 % of data used for AI development will be synthetic, up from just 1 % in 2021. By 2030, the analyst firm estimates synthetic data will completely overshadow real data in AI models.
“ There’ s no good AI, there’ s no good generative AI, without good data,” declared Iain Brown, Head of Data Science at SAS Northern Europe, during his keynote at Tech & AI LIVE.“ It’ s foundational.”
94 December 2025