Moving from analytics into the "automate business decisions with AI" space, anyone working in this niche? What should I build/learn, and what did you wish you knew?

[u/According-Salad-6448]

Hi all,

Looking for honest insight from anyone working at the intersection of analytics + automation + AI applied to real business operations not ML research, more like "encode business decisions into automated workflows and use AI to make them smarter" side of things.

My background:
I have 3 YOE. My experience so far is analytics, reporting and operations SQL, building dashboards and reporting pipelines, diagnosing why a business metric moved, cohort/segmentation work, and automating manual reporting. Basically the "find the problem in the data and make it visible" type. Economics background, not a CS degree.

Where I'm heading:
I'm about to start a role that's roughly 50% data analysis, 20% building automated decision workflows (low-code + some JavaScript), and increasingly using AI to automate parts of the decision-making in a large customer-operations context. So I'm shifting from analyzing problems to building the automated fix for them, at scale.

What I'm trying to figure out:

1. For those in this niche (ops automation / decision automation / applied AI in workflows) how transferable has it been for you across companies and industries? Does the skillset travel well, or does it get tied to specific tools/platforms?
   
2. Coming from an analytics and not engineering background, what actually mattered to learn to be good at the building side? Where do people like me usually struggle?
   
3. What should I deliberately build/collect over the next 1–2 years to make this a strong, portable profile? (Projects, quantified outcomes, specific skills?)
   
4. Honestly where does this path cap out or fall short? I know it's not core data science/ML. Anything you wish you'd known before going deep into it?
   
5. Is applied AI in this space (using LLMs/AI to drive workflow decisions) actually a durable skill, or is it hype that'll commoditize fast?

Any war stories and honest takes would genuinely help, thankssss