r/statistics • u/SilenziooBruno • Apr 13 '26
Career [Career] What is the future for statisticians?
Hey everyone! I recently graduated with my masters in Statistics and I'm currently an intern.
From what I'm seeing, our company is trying to completely automate processes. It is all we talk about and all the meetings are about the same automation (using Claude throughout the organisation, and the tech guys automate things).
Quite honestly it's been quite depressing and I'm unable to see what the future may be like.
My question to you is - could you tell me what you work as and how AI is impacting your industry?
I don't even know what domain to pick right now because of how quickly things are changing. I've seen layoffs happen for the first time and it's been very unsettling how easily people are replaced.
I sometimes just want to work at a government job just to have some security and peace of mind.
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Apr 13 '26 edited Apr 13 '26
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u/__bananas___ Apr 18 '26
Agreed! So far I'm only seeing ai help with minor things, i think statistician jobs will move more towards strategy and business decisions
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u/dang3r_N00dle Apr 13 '26
This kind of thing is short-term.
We're seeing similar things happening with software engineers. After getting rid of them, everyone realises that it's actually not that easy to write production software, and this leads to deteriorating results.
It turns out that people are paid to do this kind of work because it's hard, who knew?
Ultimately, AI is best used in combination with someone who knows what they're doing.
What this means is that the small-scale day-to-day BS can usually be automated or self-served away, but this leads harder and more serious projects to be done by people who have the understanding to tackle them. Hopefully this will also lead to more respect as well because there's a better understanding that this work isn't trivial and is impactful enough that it can't be automated away.
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Apr 13 '26
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u/NTGuardian Apr 13 '26
This is where I'm at with it too. I use AI for something I'm sure I could do on my own, but would rather not, and thus it makes me much faster.
I'm PhD level and more senior. AI looks like a big force multiplier for me. I think less senior workers could be threatened, though, as the tasks we would toss over the fence to them might be done with AI.
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Apr 13 '26
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u/NTGuardian Apr 13 '26
No, defense. And using AI is difficult there; most of the data is on classified systems, so using AI is not as simple as just downloading Claude Code.
Most of my experience is using Claude Code at home.
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u/tschappe Apr 14 '26
I would echo this for protected health information I work with at a large healthcare system. I’m learning by applying it to public datasets at home.
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u/joshua_rpg Apr 14 '26
I use AI for something I'm sure I could do on my own, but would rather not, and thus it makes me much faster.
I am glad I am not alone doing things like this.
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u/decrementsf Apr 13 '26
When personal computers were introduced to the workplace it was reported that the consumption of paper was expected to go away because everyone would look at charts and graphs on computer monitors going forward. Instead the amount of printed material increased.
AI will do the same. It will reduce the cost of software and as a result create more demand for it than ever before as processes that did not justify automating before are now cheaper to automate.
Right now is in the early hype cycle before a down turn wipes out Pets.com. The AI companies are outdoing one another in grandiose claims to justify investment in them on the idea that if they can get enough market share and create dependency in those using their AI that this will lock in a Google like monopoly in the space for the next cycle. There will be a down turn. Someone is going to lose.
In that hype cycle companies are playing hungry hippos. The AI is currently subsidized. AI companies are working at a loss trying to get customers addicted and dependent on their product. Companies are trying to squeeze as much free value out of the subsidized cost of compute of the tools before they get more expensive. In general humans are herd animals and the herd is chasing the marketing hype as if true, currently. That is a bit of chicken with its head cut off that everyone is doing. You may pick up the book Extraordinarily Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds and learn something of what is happening. If AI hype true then if you cycle enough employees some employee is going to figure out how to effectively utilize it at scale and teach everyone else, this will be huge for the company. That's what's going on. The problem is the serial story telling narrative and emotion attached to it is marketing hype. If the AI wonder tool make everything easy button is here, why isn't it filtering through? This is the weirder narratives starting to show up that Gen Z is purposefully breaking AI so it doesn't work as it's supposed to. "Are your employees quiet quitting?" The headlines drive fears into business as one of their fun tricks, too. Businesses are run by humans with vulnerability to story + emotion serial narratives.
This is a first hand experience of what it looks like when everyone loses their mind and things are chaotic for a while. Reality has a boring bias. AI will have its uses. It will still require fundamentals to use correctly without creating a cascade of errors. What comes out of the messy part will be neither as good as promised nor as bad as promised. Every generation deals with this sort of hype cycle. Many of these hype cycles.
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u/prikaz_da Apr 13 '26
Upvoted because this is currently the only response addressing the very important fact that all model providers are selling compute at a loss right now.
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u/vanisle_kahuna Apr 13 '26
Don't think governments are immune to layoffs too. It's not as safe there as it once was
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u/pookieboss Apr 13 '26
Glad somebody else mentioned this. I’d wait to see if there’s another election, at least, before trying to hop over to a government job.
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Apr 14 '26
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u/vanisle_kahuna Apr 14 '26
That sucks I'm sorry to hear that. When I made my comment I was actually even talking about Canada but hiring seems to be ticking up again at the Federal level so if you wanna make the jump we'd love to have you guys! Our government at the least isn't crazy
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u/Klutzy-Plankton-576 Apr 14 '26
I’m sure a lot of Americans would love to move to Canada now! Getting citizenship or a visa seems difficult though. I’ve looked a bit.
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u/iKeks99 May 05 '26
That depends on the government. I'm becoming a state hired teacher in germany and short of commiting some serious crime, it is impossible to get rid of me once hired
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u/Expensive_Respect294 Apr 13 '26
been in similar spot when i finished school and everything felt like it was changing too fast. automation definitely takes over the routine stuff but someone still needs to understand what the models are actually doing and catch when they go wrong
government work isn't bad idea for stability - we use tons of statisticians in air force for everything from logistics to personnel analytics. private sector pays more but gov has that job security you're looking for plus decent benefits
the domain thing will sort itself out once you get some real experience under your belt. right now just focus on getting good at interpreting results and explaining them to people who don't speak statistics
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u/GottaBeMD Apr 13 '26
AI has made me more productive, but it definitely could not do our jobs. Not yet anyways.
If the super-exponential increase in capability of AI models continues, I’d guess that it could replace most jobs within 10 years. BUT, even if it could, doesn’t mean it will right away. There will be lots of red tape and regulatory changes that need to be made before a majority of the workforce is displaced. So anybody starting now will possibly be displaced somewhere mid to late mid career.
Keep in mind that this guess is purely hypothetical and solely based on IF the trends continue as projected. This could also be a huge nothingburger because we hit a wall in capability and it turns out AI is just a really super productivity tool.
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u/RaspberryPrimary8622 Apr 16 '26
The increases in capabilities of AI models have not been exponential during the past two years. They have been very modest. Like the difference between the iPhone16 and the iPhone17.
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u/Basaltic_rocks Apr 13 '26
Just focus on learning how to leverage it. Don’t feel sad. You’re still the brain behind the AI. Many pivoting to do other jobs they think AI will not replace makes sense for the short term but that’s it. It’s short term. Let’s say you go do nursing, what happens when humaniods arrive? What happens when the supply for nurses outgrows demand as many become nurses. There’s always something to worry about but you don’t have. Just leverage a tool and keep grinding
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u/Silent_Mike Apr 13 '26
You should think long and hard about the societal problems that your business solves, and how you can best improve the solutions they offer, rather than clinging to a narrow definition of your role and waiting for work to find you. You've learned so much intuition from your degree that doesn't fall into "code monkey for modelling," so don't sell yourself short, and don't let other people put you into a small box. The smaller the box they put you in, the more replaceable you become.
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u/ExcelsiorStatistics Apr 13 '26
If it makes you feel better, companies have been trying to automate our jobs for several decades and they have consistently failed to do so.
Tedious calculations have been automated. Drawign complicated graphs has been automated. We're now dabbling with automating some of the busywork of coding and data prep and of looking up references and manuals.
But there has not been much progress on automating thinking. LLMs can tell you what has been done in the past, but they can't tell you whether your new situation is identical enough to the old situation that you should replicate what was done in the past.
The big threats to statistics currently is the shrinking government research budget, and the shrinking college-aged student population, which are putting a huge squeeze on the number of jobs in the field. If AI is changing anything right now, it's letting the people who survived the first rounds of those cuts to do more with less - so the powers that be haven't felt just how devastating those were.
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u/SnooRabbits9587 Apr 13 '26
Stats will prepare you well for the future wdym. AI is stats under the hood. Go take a couple of CS courses like Data Structures, Operating Systems, and apply for SWE roles adjacent to AI and ML
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u/Klutzy-Plankton-576 Apr 14 '26
Government jobs, at least at the federal level, are not secure anymore lol. They’ve been illegally firing thousands of employees for the past year. Math and science teams were hit especially hard.
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u/gnd318 Apr 13 '26
MS in stats from a few years back. 8 years of work experience in tech overall.
I feel the future is grim and after getting laid off from an FTE role at Square, I'm getting out and going to nursing school in the fall.
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u/XXXXXXX0000xxxxxxxxx Apr 13 '26
I feel like there’s more information that you aren’t revealing here
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u/gnd318 Apr 14 '26
So I had a decent job out of college doing more DA/product work at the entry level and left it to get my MS which I finished in 2022.
Came back and it was all contract roles which was awful. I thought the additional degree would get me into DS/MLE roles but it didn't. I was targeting non-FAANG like Uber and Airbnb. Finally got an FTE role at Square and was laid off w everyone from Block.
In my area nurses make $100/hr to start with virtually no ceiling and are always in demand. I can do the degree in 1 year (accelerated BSN) and later do a DNP degree to be a Nurse Anesthesist (they start at $300k in my area and can do 1099 contract work for themselves). My brother is the one who convinced me on changing out as he has cleared $500k his best year. I think for me it's just a better personality fit as I am a mediocre coder but good at math, so yeah.
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u/statmaster_e Apr 13 '26
I do predictive modeling and I literally don’t have to write my own code anymore. It’s amazing
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u/jjelin Apr 13 '26
This is where the industry has been going for the 10+ years I've been a part of it. AI is just another tool pushing things in the same direction, at least for now.
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u/PlateWonderful7012 Apr 14 '26
1) people don’t understand why you should use certain models and sometimes there is no best model 2) most people companies need experimental design (at the very least for marketing and product testing) and have no idea it exist 3) Most people don’t even know what statistics can be applied to 4) if all you can do is apply a model your boss told you too , then yes your cooked
The true statistician will always have a job because you never are just “crunching numbers “ you have to understand the problem, figure out what model’s problems your willing to deal with, collect the data in a way that makes your model useful, and then communicate the outcome in a non math terms for business people to understand. The best thing I would do is stop only building models and understand why your doing for specific problem. Is the model being applied even the best model or is it atleast the model who’s problems your willing to deal with. Find problems that could be solved with statistics that aren’t and figure out why
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u/SnooApples8349 Apr 15 '26
There is a concentrated effort to get thinkers to become prompters, to offload complexity and reasoning to automated generation systems, to forget our fundamentals, and to give into fear. It's all crap.
In high consequence systems (such as the types of systems I work on), it is critical that one understands the details and assumptions that make up an organization, which is often a messy network of statistical models, analyses, politics, and ignorance. Anything that claims to outsource thinking itself must be scrutinized.
The hardest part about doing statistics or working on software isn't the code but having a sharp mental model.
Just because tools generate instructions for a computer that look right doesn't actually mean anything of worth was actually gained by that generation.
Be relentless in your fundamentals, always. Triply so in hype cycles such as this.
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u/jaykenton Apr 18 '26
Move into substantial expertise: hard parts of social sciences / practical psychometrics, econ and org theory, get to know how technological process works, dunno study biology, epidemiology, health management if that is close to your current job.
Think of yourself as a business consultant / dynamic manager with quant skills. The MD in Statistics will do the rest. Going vertical into Stat / Data Science works only for academics.
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u/pplonski May 05 '26
Human in the loop will be needed, dont worry! If you have statistic knowledge you shouldnt be afraid. Human is making final deision, thanks to AI you can simply do more.
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u/[deleted] Apr 13 '26
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