Concepts Data Professionals Need to Know in 2025: Part 2 | by Sarah Lea | January, 2025
From AI Agent to Human-In-The-Loop – Master 12 data concepts and turn them into simple projects to stay ahead of IT.
Innovation in the field of data continues at a rapid pace.
Let's take a quick look at GenAI's timeline: ChatGPT, launched in November 2022, became the world's most popular generative AI app by early 2023. In the spring of 2025, leading companies such as Salesforce (Marketing Cloud Growth) and Adobe (Firefly) are integrated into standard programs – making it accessible to companies of various sizes. Tools like MidJourney improved image generation, while at the same time, discussions about agent AI are taking center stage. Today, tools like ChatGPT are already familiar to many private users.
That's why I've put together 12 terms that you will definitely encounter as a data engineer, data scientist and data analyst in 2025 and it's important that you understand them. Why are they important? What are the challenges? And how can you use them in a small project?
Table of Contents
Term 1–6 in part 1: Data Warehouse, Data Lake, Data Lakehouse, Cloud Platforms, Optimizing data storage, Big Data technologies, ETL, ELT and Zero-ETL, Even-Driven-Architecture
7 — List of Data & XAI
8 – Gen AI
9 – Agent AI
10 – Inference Time Compute
11 – Near Infinite Memory
12 – Human Development-In-The-Loop-Augmentation
Final thoughts
