GenAI has come to the enterprise data team, and expectations are sky-high. A new survey of data and analytics executives by Wakefield Research on behalf of data copilot company Prophecy finds data departments are well underway with GenAI, with early adopters seeing huge gains in productivity.

Among data teams using GenAI, nearly half (41%) are seeing productivity growth of 15%-30% for overall data delivery. Even more (46%) report jumps of 31%-50%. Given average GenAI productivity gains of 25%, these results suggest data teams stand to gain at least as much, or more, from GenAI than other parts of the enterprise.

Adoption is moving fast. Overall, 64% of data teams are already using GenAI, and every organization surveyed has, at minimum, plans to use GenAI in the future. A remarkable 23% say their GenAI efforts are already "fully scaled." The most common use case is automatic data curation (58%), with conversational analytics (51%) and data tests and quality (51%) running a close second and third.

Top management is on board—and sometimes leading the charge. A quarter of executives (25%) say their leaders will greenlight any project "with AI as a core component," though the largest group (44%) are a bit more cautious, seeing the need for AI investment while putting at least some guardrails on the process.

Despite widespread enthusiasm for GenAI, data executives see obstacles to adoption as well. The issue most commonly cited (36%) is the need for better data governance, while 24% say faster access to data is the most significant hurdle. A substantial minority (36%) say all GenAI projects require review at a company-wide level, potentially bottlenecking innovation and development at those organizations.