Rittman Analytics 2025 Wrapped : A Year of Platforms, People and High-Performing Data Teams

Mark Rittman

Jan 19, 2026

Semantic Layer

Looker

Data Engineering

Modern Data Stack

Spotify has Wrapped. Everyone else has year end lists. Here’s our take on 2025 at Rittman Analytics.

The topics we kept coming back to

1. The semantic layer as the foundation for everything else

A lot of our writing this year circled around Looker, conversational analytics, and AI assisted BI. The consistent conclusion was that none of this works without a strong semantic layer underneath. Without shared definitions, governed metrics, and agreed grain, conversational analytics just accelerates confusion rather than removing it.

2. AI that scales judgement rather than replacing it

The most interesting AI work we did this year was not about chatbots. It was about packaging judgement, context, and workflow so it can be reused consistently, from Deploying Maxwell’s Demon: QA Automation in Droughty through to From Prompts to Skills: Automating Financial and KPI Analysis in Looker with Claude Skills and MCP Toolbox.

In both cases, the goal was the same: take something experienced consultants do well, make it explicit, and then make it repeatable.

3. Data teams versus data functions

Our theme mid-year was data team enablement and in When Your Talented Data Team Is Stuck in Second Gear our core argument was simple: you can have good people and a modern stack and still fail to deliver value. The limiting factor is usually the operating model, not the talent or the tooling.

4. Self service with grown up guardrails

Across multiple projects and meetups, self service analytics kept resurfacing as a tension point. Too locked down and teams stall. Too open and trust collapses. The work with clients like Pleo showed that the answer is not less governance, but shared governance.

The things that surprised us

1. Project health lives in unstructured data

In Automating Project RAG Status Reporting with GenAI and Looker
we found that the most useful delivery signals were hidden in meeting transcripts, Slack messages, and statements of work. Metrics alone rarely tell you whether a project is actually healthy.

2. Community and partnerships Still Win

We helped kick off the London Looker Meetup and ran two events this year with the support of Google and the wider partner ecosystem.

We also started a genuinely exciting collaboration with Barton Peveril College and Google on a BigQuery data lake, Looker dashboards, a central semantic layer, and natural language data access to help improve outcomes in education. Consulting is all about helping people achieve their goals.

3. AI made a small team move very fast

Our new website is intentionally treated as a data and AI product, not a brochure. In Opinionated, AI Enabled, Modern: The Story Behind the Rittman Analytics Website we explained how we’d used AI assisted development to move quickly without sacrificing quality. That approach worked better than expected.

4. So is possible to cycle over Ditchling Beacon in September

Six of us rode from London to Brighton for the British Heart Foundation. This was my third time riding for BHF but the first time the wider team joined in — and the first time I personally made-it over Ditchling Beacon at the end.

It was uncomfortable (somewhat of an understatement), rewarding (in the pub afterwards) and a good reminder that work is only one part of what binds a team together.

Top 5 achievements we are, in a terribly-British way, rather proud of

Not like we like to toot-our-own-horn, but this year we’ve delivered more projects, helped enable more data teams and delighted more clients than ever before — thank you to our team and most-importantly, our amazing clients, friends and partners.

35 projects completed for 23 clients : Across fintech, retail, SaaS, healthcare, education, and more. Different needs, same outcome: clarity and confidence.
17 new Looker platforms implemented, plus 8 rebooted and relaunched : A lot of semantic modelling, governance, and practical delivery discipline. Also a lot of “what do we actually mean by revenue” conversations and breathing-into paper bags discreetly.
Revenue up 60% year on year : Growth, but the good kind: driven by outcomes, not hype.
Consulting team grown by 4 : More capability, more delivery leadership, more people to argue with about naming conventions
Average NPS of 9.47 : We will take that. Happily.

And a final note before we wrap-up the year: if 2025 proved anything, it is that organisations do not just need tools. They need partners who can translate ambition into action and complexity into confidence.

Modern data done properly is not just a stack, it’s platforms, process, people, and the boring discipline that makes the exciting stuff real.

Interested? Find Out More!

Rittman Analytics is a boutique data analytics consultancy that partners with successful organisations to transform their overwhelmed data teams from a reactive cost centre into a proactive, strategic asset. We deliver more than technology; we deliver the organisational change that makes it work.

You can read more about our approach to modernising data teams and data platforms on our website, where you can also take our diagnostic assessment and receive a custom playbook with targeted advice for your specific challenges.

So if you’re looking for some help and assistance scaling your data capabilities or would just like to talk shop and share your thoughts on what’s going on in your organisation and the wider data analytics world, contact us now to organise a 100%-free, no-obligation call — we’d love to hear from you!