Kamba | White Paper · December 2025

Data spend is up. AI is expected. Workflows are still broken.

CIOs and Heads of Data are sitting on rising budgets, complex vendor stacks, and pressure to “do something” with AI. The short version: the problem is not lack of data or lack of AI — it’s workflow. The firms that win will treat data and AI as a single operating system, not two separate projects.

Executive overview

Market reality: alt-data budgets are expanding or steady for ~90% of buy-side firms; market data remains resilient.
AI shift: internal AI usage has roughly doubled YoY; generative/agentic AI is now a CIO agenda item.
Where firms are stuck: price negotiations, feed cleaning, entitlements, and redoing the same DQR/backtests on repeat.
The cost: PMs/quants wait months for datasets that should be in production in weeks; compliance risk rises with limited visibility into agent behavior.
The bar for 2026: AI-native workflows that deliver Sharpe-relevant impact — not another sandbox.

At a glance

Alt-data budgets (directional)

~90% ↑ or flat

Most buy-side firms expect spend to grow or hold into 2026.

Market data

Resilient / sticky

Slow growth, high retention, hard to rationalize without usage + impact signals.

Core thesis

Workflow is the bottleneck

Economics are dominated by time-to-production and governance friction.

Written from the vantage point of Kamba’s work with data-intensive hedge funds, multi-PM platforms, and asset managers.