What makes an AI agent?

2025 was the year AI stopped being a curiosity and started reshaping real work. From data analysts speeding up entire workflows in minutes, to managers learning how to lead hybrid teams of humans and agents, the pace of change has been relentless. Across DataFramed this year, one theme kept surfacing: AI isn’t replacing data professionals—it’s raising the bar on what good looks like. Skills are shifting, careers are becoming more fluid, and organizations are being forced to rethink how they build teams, make decisions, and govern technology that now reasons, plans, and acts on our behalf. This Best of 2025 episode pulls together the most important ideas, voices, and debates from a year that fundamentally changed how data and AI show up in practice.

In this special year-end roundup, Richie revisits the standout moments from DataFramed in 2025, spanning careers, business intelligence, data literacy, AI agents, industry use cases, and responsible AI foundations. You’ll hear why the data analyst role is evolving rather than disappearing, how hybrid human–AI teams are becoming the norm, and why communication remains the most underrated skill in data careers, the state of BI and data storytelling, the shift from training to behavior change in data and AI literacy, the rapid rise of agentic systems powered by reasoning at inference time. We also dive into real-world applications across healthcare, finance, and enterprise operations, alongside hard truths about data quality, governance, and model lineage. Finally, we spotlight advances in data science, NLP, and synthetic data—rounding out a year defined by faster cycles, higher expectations, and a renewed focus on getting the fundamentals right as AI scales.

Episodes Featured in this Recap:

• #326 Is the Data Analyst Role Dying Out? with Mo Chen, Data & Analytics Manager at NatWest Group
• #319 Building & Managing Human+Agent Hybrid Teams with Karen Ng, Head of Product at HubSpot
• #295 How To Get Hired As A Data Or AI Engineer with Deepak Goyal, CEO & Founder at Azurelib Academy
• #294 Six Skills Data Professionals Need To Succeed with Abhijit Bhaduri, Brand Evangelist & Former General Manager of Global L&D at Microsoft
• #333 Creating an AI-First Data Team with Bilal Zia, Head of Data Science & Analytics at DuoLingo
• #310 The State of BI in 2025 with Howard Dresner, Godfather of BI
• #306 The Next Generation of Business Intelligence with Colin Zima, CEO at Omni
• #298 Data Storytelling Skills to Increase Your Impact with Kat Greenbrook, Author of The Data Storyteller's Handbook
• #323 The Evolution of Data Literacy & AI Literacy with Jordan Morrow, Godfather of Data Literacy
• #305 RAG 2.0 and The New Era of RAG Agents with Douwe Kiela, CEO at Contextual AI, Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, Inventor of RAG
• #316 Enterprise AI Agents with Jun Qian, VP of Generative AI Services at Oracle
• #328 The Challenges of Enterprise Agentic AI with Manasi Vartak, Chief AI Architect at Cloudera
• #308 A Framework for GenAI App and Agent Development with Jerry Liu, CEO at LlamaIndex
• #312 Can we Create an AI Doctor? with Aldo Faisal, Professor in AI & Neuroscience at Imperial College
• #288 How Generative AI is Transforming Finance with Andrew Reiskind, CDO at Mastercard
• #311 The Human Element of AI-Driven Transformation with Steve Lucas, CEO at Boomi
• #303 Increasing Your Organization's AI Maturity with Iwo Szapar & Eryn Peters, Founders at AI Maturity Index
• #286 Data Science Trends from 2 Kaggle Grandmasters with Jean-Francois Puget, Distinguished Engineer at NVIDIA & Chris Deotte, Senior Data Scientist at NVIDIA
• #275 Did Gen AI Kill NLP? with Meri Nova, Technical Founder at Break into Data
• #307 Human Guardrails in Generative AI with Wendy Gonzalez & Duncan Curtis, CEO & SVP of Gen AI at Sama

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