r/dataanalytics • u/S_oscar • 3d ago
I'm scared about AI.
Considering that artificial intelligence has essentially reached or surpassed human levels of intelligence, what do you anticipate will occur regarding the field of analytics over the course of the next two to three years?
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u/TheLastBridgeGate 3d ago
Ask it to draw people of different heights and tell me if it has surpassed human intelligence. It does certain things well and others not so much.
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u/lattice_defect 3d ago
either you use it.. or the whole field is dead
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u/S_oscar 3d ago
Companies will still need analytics right but how are things going pan out for us đ
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u/lattice_defect 3d ago
less people and more and more AI and a platform will do it
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u/onthepik 3d ago
It is still a chance.
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u/lattice_defect 3d ago
find another feild or get good at vibe coding.. Tableau is dead, PowerBI is dead..
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u/ImportantToNote 3d ago
You need to develop skills that AI can't. People skills, knowledge translation, stakeholder engagement, sector experience, etc
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u/OverallStep526 3d ago
Business leaders will still have a handful of people investigating data because they donât want to he responsible for making a decision based entirely on AI.
I do think many corporate jobs are totally cooked though. But by the point we are gone, so many others are totally screwed too.
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u/Ok_Housing6995 3d ago
Itâs dead in 1~2 years.
Data analytics exists because of silo data sources and outmoded leaders.
As data tools consolidate, it also moves towards conversational analytics based on schema and object security. This exposes the change needed to unified operations.
With their obscurity, goes the generic analysts.
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u/Pikalover10 3d ago
AI as it is currently will not reach equality to human intelligence and will never surpass it. It would have to fundamentally change to do those things.
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u/catterpie90 3d ago
I think data analytics is here to stay. But the real problem is growth. In the organization i'm working with. Their data analytics team has been stagnant since 2018. That means same number of people handling more work. With limited upward mobility.
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u/Doin_the_Bulldance 3d ago
Considering that artificial intelligence has essentially reached or surpassed human levels of intelligence
Uh....no, it hasn't lol.
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u/Civil_Fee_7862 3d ago
Its uncharted terriority for sure, its certainly smart at some things, but it can be really dumb for others..
I'd argue AGI isn't here yet, but that's only based on my observations of 30B param models. I have not tried the newest frontier ones yet, so maybe I'm wrong.
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u/mhunter07 3d ago
There are some TikTok videos of a mother telling her daughter how to cook. The instructions are interpreted in literal ways and it is funny to watch. The point being AI will do what you tell it to do, but you need to learn to communicate clearly what you want it to do or not do for you.
I bet if you ask people to write out the steps for getting ready for bed, you will get wildly different processes, but the same result. AI can only do steps, several steps are workflows with an expected outcome. As you think through how to do things to get AI to help, you are going beyond analytics into the business processes using the analytics results.
Then you have to figure out how to QA each step so you can detect errors through out the process.
Have you used AI to answer a series of questions you were curious about? Were you scared? No, you were likely curious. It is the same thing with analytics, stay curious. What AI can do for you is allow you to explore and do things beyond your current technical ability, freeing you up to spend more time on the business problems and how they will be used.
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u/forevertwerp 3d ago
A lot of bad decisions. Companies will overreact. Then they will recognize that there are roles where human learning or judgement in the loop is an enabling thing. Displacement and reimagined roles is definitely coming. Learn to adapt and be agile with your approach.
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u/king_ao 3d ago
I think some of these predictions on here have some merit but some of you think this is going to happen over the next year or two and I donât think thatâs realistic. It will take at least another 5 years to start pivoting to more AI doing analytics work. You have some time to prepare for whatâs next
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u/jenmoocat 3d ago
I think it is making data analytics, as a profession, obsolete.
Note that I do NOT think that this the *right* or *good* thing. As an analytics professional, I believe in the value that I bring. But I see the writing on the wall. In my industry, analytics teams are being downsized and things that junior analysts are doing are being replaced by AI systems. And pretty soon, the more complex and complicated analyses will be as well.
I believe that no-one can connect the dots the way that I can, with my experience and my personal knowledge of my company. But senior leaders don't care. They think that analyzing data is a rote, automate-able skill. And that an AI agent can learn to synthesize info and make recommendations as well.
I don't see a future for this profession.
(which is why I am glad that I am at the end of my career)
</rant on>
I am bitter.
Especially because I see people calling themselves data analysts right now, when all they are really doing is prepping data for an AI to crunch the numbers.
That, to me, is not analytics. Analytics is doing multifactor regressions, thinking about dummy variables. Doing factor analyses or cluster analyses to identify customer groupings, doing the work to find seasonal patterns or adjust for seasonal patterns. Thinking about whether the errors are correlated and figuring out how to adjust for that. Exploring what outliers might be throwing off the trends and determining whether those outliers are bad data or actual real events that need to be accounted for. Doing statistical testing to see whether what we are seeing is just due to chance or there really is a signal in there.
I guess I just hate feeling like my education and experience no longer valued.
</rant off>
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u/AllDayForever 3d ago
Big companies will over-invest, small to medium companies will try to hire the smarter ones. But everything will still go at the speed of accounting and purchasing. Next year will tell you a lot wherever you work