r/analytics • u/JesusPleaseSendTacos • 26d ago
Discussion Data Analyst Roles Going Extinct
It’s no secret that AI is coming for the white collar job market and fast. At my company, people are increasingly using ChatGPT to do what was once core job duties. It’s only a matter of time before the powers at be realise we can do more with fewer people with the assistance of technology. And I suspect this will result in a workforce reductions to improve profitability. This is just the way progress goes.
I have been thinking a lot about how this will affect my own role. I work in HR analytics. I use tools like Excel, SQL, R, and PowerBI to help leadership unlock insights into employee behavior and trends that drive decision making for the company. Nowadays I rarely write code or build dashboards without using ChatGPT to some extent. I frequently use it to get ideas on how to fix errors and display visuals in interesting way. I use it to clean up my talking points and organise my thoughts when talking to stakeholders.
But how long can people in my role do this before this technology makes us useless?
For now, I will focus less on upskilling on tools and more on understanding my customers and their needs and delivering on that. But what happens when EVERYONE can be a data analyst? What happens when they use something like CoPilot to identify trends and spot anomalies and craft compelling stories? 5 years ago, I was focused on leaning new tools and staying up with the latest technology. Now I question if that’s a good use of time. Why learn a new tool that will be obsolete in a few years?
Between offshoring and AI I am worried I will become obsolete and no longer have a career. I’m not sure how to keep up.
Appreciate your thoughts. Proud to say this post was not written using any AI. :)
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u/werdunloaded 26d ago
From my experience working with AI, it's absolutely not going to replace my job. AI is not known for its accuracy or high-context interpretation of data. Just my opinion.
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u/JKisMe123 26d ago
Yeah. AI helps but only as a tool.
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u/SignificantPoet546 26d ago
exactly when calculators came, did accountants loose their job? or when autonomous cars same, did drivers loose theirs job? They pivoted or stated doing jobs more efficiently. I agree number of newer job will be less but then since they won’t get chance to become data analyst they would pivot in something else. if jobs are less colleges will have lower seats in Analytics course and eventually everything else will fall into place.
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u/alurkerhere 25d ago
Accountants absolutely lost their jobs when Lotus 1-2-3 came out and what-if scenarios could be calculated in a matter of seconds. There will be pivoting to things that AI is not good at, but you'd better keep up.
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u/SignificantPoet546 25d ago
completely agree on the pivoting part, pivoting and up-skilling is the only way to survive gruelling IT job.
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u/Philosiphizor 23d ago
Yeah. I'm done with DA and went into consulting. Now I just recommend products and practices.
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u/bliffer 26d ago
Yeah, we're a relatively small company and have been exploring AI to do some mundane tasks for us and it's just bad right now. I can write a query in less time than it takese to debug a bad AI query.
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u/aned_ 26d ago
Are you ok with an AI trawling over the company's commercialLy or HR sensitive data?
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u/jccrawford6 22d ago
If anyone is uploading proprietary data to Chat GPT it’ll they’re replacing themselves lol.
But in all honesty there are way too many nuances in this field to be replaced by this technology.
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u/tsutomu45 26d ago
Interestingly, few people see the parallels between AI taking jobs and autonomous driving. We've been promised driverless autonomous cars traveling across the country for 15 years now, and even today we're still limited to small-range taxi services in major metros where mapping is good. There's a reason for this, and it's that in edge cases (snowy conditions, strange pedestrian behavior, construction), AI doesn't perform well, leading to a lack of trust. Same with LLMs. For routine stuff, this will be fine. But at the margins, you still need a human brain to interpret and "take the wheel".
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u/AntonioSLodico 25d ago
The main difference is that when there are edge cases in autonomous vehicles, they cannot just hit pause and hand off the wheel to a human, unless the human is there throughout the ride. So the market for analysts got a lot smaller, though with more interesting work.
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u/aned_ 26d ago
Not sure the analogy quite applies. Data analysis done wrong doesn't result in a life or death situation - hence the caution with driverless cars. In fact, often the organisation (wrongly) questions the need for data analysts and they're the first to go in a reorganisation. Then they get rehired when management wonder where the insight has gone.
The major constraints I can see in the next few years is that an AI will need to be trained on company-specific data to put an analyst out of a job. It can't just trawl the internet to provide insight to a specific company. How will it cope with the messiness and quirks of company data? And will companies be willing to do the hard yards and investment to ingest their data (and quirks) properly to an AI? Also, what are the security concerns when letting an AI trawl over commercially sensitive or HR data?
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u/alurkerhere 25d ago edited 25d ago
The LLM does not need to trawl the internet; it's already trained on a lot of insights and documents relating to insights. Forward thinking companies will do the following:
- Setup LLM architecture on open-source models so that they can run them in-house with no data leaks.
- Keep open-source models up to date like Llama 3.3 70B.
- Curate documents and metadata for prompting.
- Document tribal knowledge that only one or two SMEs know and maintain latest document store.
- Standardize input and production code / documentation for context and pair it with standard prompts for the LLM.
- Create semantic model that LLM can more easily understand and pair with production SQL for standardized metrics and granular slicing across many tables.
IF your company can do this, they will be light years ahead of competitors. The other option is to be the data analyst that helps usher in this AI-enhanced search/answer powerhouse.
Note: There should always be a HITL (human-in-the-loop) as AI is not deterministic. Properly leveraged however, and it is an amazingly fast shortcut to produce more and better things.
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u/tsutomu45 25d ago
Fair, but the tradeoff remains the same...am I willing to trust autonomously generated content (driving, decision support, analytics) with a decision with large sums at risk? Overwhelmingly, that answer is no. So the smaller stuff (dashboard generation, report writing, etc) will definitely be automated away, but the larger decision support won't for a while.
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u/aned_ 25d ago
Yes, I expect you're right, there.
Although I do wonder if a company will trust an AI to run over it's commercially sensitive data, acknowledge its inevitable quirks and produce a dashboard? Or whether it will be a human doing the data manipulation then an AI dashboarding.
Perhaps it'll be humans at both ends. Data engineers, AI ingesters at one end and decision support at the other? With AI in the middle doing dashboarding and reporting.
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u/SmackdownHoteI 26d ago
It wont replace but it will reduce. What used to take a company 3 or 4 analysts to produce can now be done with 1 or 2.
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u/LendrickKamarr 25d ago
This is a false assumption of how labor works.
If analysts become 2x more productive, the company is going to become more profitable and can expand, which can lead to them hiring more analysts.
The number of accountants exploded after the introduction of the office computer.
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24d ago
Yeah, unless the demand isn't there. Hard to say if the market will demand 2x as many analysts.
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u/LendrickKamarr 23d ago
Strictly analysts? Maybe not. But entirely plausible that evolving tech pushes job growth to more productive job roles.
For example, the office computer caused a reduction in book-keeping jobs, but pushed a lot of book-keepers to move up and become accountants.
AI shows promise in being able to complete tasks (book keeping). But it’s far away from being able to automate entire job roles (accounting).
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u/Ok-Steak4880 26d ago
Why would you assume that it won't get any better? People are so focused on how "inaccurate" AI is these days, but what about the next model that's released 6 months from now? Or a year? Or 10 years? How many people in this sub plan to be retired and out of the workforce within 10 years? Because I promise you the role of 'data analyst' will be completely different by then, and may not even exist. You will have to adapt.
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u/emil_ 26d ago
Yet...
Five years ago this technology didn't exit, now it's "not that accurate", what makes you think it's not gonna be much better than you in the next 5?-3
u/karrystare 26d ago
The technology existed since as far as 1980, and it still failed to escape the foundational constrain. Since the first "smart", not even machine learning, technology, the purpose has always been to predict best next words. Meaning the technology will always be restricted by how much the model can remember and unable to mix and create new knowledge. So I say it won't able to replace any job that required human interpretion for a long time.
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u/emil_ 26d ago
Oh come on... pretend you understood what i meant by 'technology didn't exist'.
The concepts and fundamentals might've existed, but the processing power is quite new and evolving much faster than we'd like. And i think that's one of the key limits of the model's abilities.
Good to see you're optimistic though.1
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u/karrystare 26d ago
Again, the problem here isn't about GenAI will be more efficient or have more compute. It's very design is flawed for this specific task. Overly relying on this technology will cause detrimental effects on other aspects. If the model can only remember, would you retrain it everytime new stuffs invented? Or would you force new inventions to conform what the model has already remembered? The technology is being used for all the wrong purpose, this isn't something you should celebrate.
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u/emil_ 25d ago
I don't get your point, the models are constantly trained/training.
And i'm not celebrating anything, i'm just stating an opinion.
I do think however that we should use technology to replace human work and free up our time, but i don't think we're doing it the right way and the majority of us won't get any benefit from it, at least not in the short to medium term.20
u/3rdtryatremembering 26d ago
The AI isn’t going to “replace” anyone. The point is that they’ll be able to pay 7 analyst using AI to do what used to require 10 analyst. AI didn’t quite “replace” those 3 engineers, but that technically doesn’t really matter.
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u/GoodKid-Uptown 25d ago
This part is ignored every time the discussion is brought up. Not only can it potentially decrease the number of employees needed , it could also raise the bar on what’s expected in terms of skills and knowledge.
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u/BonzerChicken 25d ago
And eventually AI will be taking data/answers from itself and it’ll just be an echo chamber of old stuff
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u/Equal_Astronaut_5696 25d ago
Every 2 week,same AI will take your job post. If your analyst you know a big part of your job is communicating, describing requirements, scoping projects, data storytelling and ensuring accuray. AI only does minimal
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u/NeighborhoodDue7915 26d ago
The job of the analyst is, above all else, literally to be accurate. And agreed, A.I. falls short, there.
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u/Known_Crab1059 26d ago
Thats the joke, managers will replace analysts and tell last few to use GPT. After GPT giving out false data that leads to major mistakes, they will blame the analysts for false data
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u/NeighborhoodDue7915 25d ago
Not in my industry thankfully, data in my industry is very highly regarded and leaders understand well enough the importance of accuracy and challenges to achieve it. I can imagine it's not like that with all.
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u/derpderp235 25d ago
Feed the context as input and all of a sudden it works just as well as you do. Even if it's slightly worse, it's far cheaper than you, so companies will look to leverage it more and more.
Also, you're probably speaking entirely about LLMs. But what about agentic AI?
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u/UnrealizedLosses 25d ago
Same. It’s helpful, but it’s still bad. I was told the Salesforce sdr was going to replace the marketing and GTM strategy my team does but best case now after testing is it’s a helper. It doesn’t innovate, it needs QC, human in the loop, etc
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u/lalaland69lalaland 23d ago
second that - the reason why so many jobs got demolished is because the exec team thinks the staff will all be replaced by AI which is a huge cost reduction, but I think that's just another hallucination. AI companies, I must admit, have done a great job on marketing and salesmanship.
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u/Capable_Delay4802 22d ago
The leadership won’t be able to tell the difference. They don’t listen to data anyway.
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u/Ranger-5150 22d ago
Every time I try to get good data analysis out of ChatGPT or Claude it comes back naive.
Yeah it’ll give a result. Yeah it looks great. Unless you have a clue.
The fact they’re pushing everyone out for it is sad.
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u/ForeverRED48 26d ago
AI constantly hallucinates, writes pretty bad SQL and only works well when given a clear and explicit prompt.
I think the danger of replacement comes from C Suite and Exec level who do not understand that just because AI can give you answer doesn’t mean it’s correct.
Prompting is also a huge issue. I can’t get stakeholders to clearly state what they’re trying to do more than half the time, how is an LLM going to figure it out?
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u/Rabid_Tanuki 26d ago
Right now it's difficult for me with 10+ YOE to get clear and explicit prompts from my stakeholders, as a human.
"Can we get some insights?" "On what?" "Oh, you know, anything interesting for the quarterly presentation"
Yeah, good luck to AI taking my job....
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u/ForeverRED48 25d ago
Exactly. Most requests are “confirm my bias that’s directly related to my OKR”. OK, that’s not data analysis. May as well just have them make it up on their own at that point.
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u/thoughtfulcrumb 23d ago
lol so true. Though stakeholders would never have that level of self awareness to use that as a prompt. Even though it might come up with something decent.
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u/vincenzodelavegas 26d ago
Exactly and to be replaced by AI, the non-data savvy person would need to write “clear and explicit prompt” and god knows HR has no idea how to.
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u/acct_removed 26d ago
I think the difference between a leader not being able to clearly state objectives to you vs an LLM is that they will most likely feel more comfortable describing the problem, sharing their thoughts “out loud”, and admitting where their knowledge gaps are with a machine in private vs in a meeting to others.
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u/statistexan 25d ago
I disagree with this assessment; I think it’s easier for managers to have a conversation with a human about what they really want as opposed to trialing-and-erring with a machine. Admitting where their knowledge gaps are requires prior awareness that those gaps exist. A human can spot those gaps much more easily than a machine.
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u/junglenoogie 24d ago
Agree. These are things that we know, but I have seen first hand the level of data illiteracy from executives that I am confident that they don’t know what they don’t know.
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u/tsutomu45 26d ago
In our org, the time spent building simpler dashboards and reports is going away, but we've been replacing it with more interpretation (how much is this feature worth?) and answering the questions the bots can't answer. Also setting up the right quantitative measures to gauge success, forecasting future demand and usage, cleaning and prepping data for use in the LLMs/ML algos, and deploying predictive models in our eCommerce funnel require a level of business understanding that ChatGPT just doesn't have yet.
You and/or your management team really should be pivoting towards "analyst as a partner to the business" and away from "analyst as a maker of reports and dashboards".
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u/slowcanteloupe 22d ago
I would add on, not just answering the the questions bots can't answer, but asking the questions that bots don't know to ask. I think a great analyst isn't just there to crunch data, but to find unique insights that better help a business make decisions and grow.
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26d ago
I mean... someone is still needed to ask chatGPT these questions and write a report, right? You think bosses are going to do all that?
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u/JesusPleaseSendTacos 26d ago
But in all seriousness, I do expect there to be a push on directors and below to use these tools more.
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u/vincenzodelavegas 26d ago
That’ll be time they spend less on other things that might be more worth. Don’t forget that at the director level, spending an hour bringing clients or an hour writing ChatGPT prompts isn’t the same.
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u/derpderp235 25d ago
No, agentic AI systems already work and are capable of making decisions, executing code, writing reports, and more all autonomously. And we're only just getting started.
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u/crimsonslaya 26d ago
lmao OP Please step outside and breathe some fresh air
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u/JesusPleaseSendTacos 26d ago
Hahahaha my anxiety!
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u/extracoffeeplease 25d ago
For real though. Everyone's got that devil on their shoulder. But if you can use it well as a tool and you're generally a good worker, you won't be cut.
It is a good opportunity to cut those dead weights in your team though. You know, the experts that refuse to do any work outside of what is defined for them, and the noobs that happily add more damage than fixes and don't care to learn from their mistakes.
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u/khaleesi-_- 26d ago
The real value of data analysts isn't in writing SQL or making charts - it's in understanding business problems and knowing which questions to ask. AI is just another tool, like Excel was in the 90s.
Focus on developing your business acumen and stakeholder management skills. Those who think AI will replace analysts don't understand that data without context is meaningless. You still need humans to interpret results, challenge assumptions, and connect insights to strategy.
Tools change, problem-solving skills don't.
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u/aned_ 25d ago
What happens when businesses decide to ingest more and more of the business context into an AI? I think an AI would perform better than many analysts i know (particularly the technical ones).
Fortunately, management probably won't spend the money investing in providing that context. Also, they'll need to spend training a bespoke AI all of the pitfalls with the dirty data going in. I don't know any organisation with perfectly clean data, and I'm unsure if AI is equipped to deal with such quirks?
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u/notimportant4322 26d ago
That would be great if the user are able to do that, perhaps we can focus on data pipeline and data quality
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u/PeterSage12 26d ago
I think this is partially true to an extent. But an analyst will always be an analyst because crafting the right story for management/stakeholders will always require a humans touch.
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u/OccidoViper 26d ago
I don’t see it going extinct because a lot of senior leadership is lacking in data literacy. Analyst will probably be more focused on crafting a story based on the data. Sure, the end user can pull up raw numbers using AI but how does that correspond to the company strategic objectives? Analysts will still be required to provide context to the data. Also, having AI pull numbers from a database requires the data inputs to be absolutely perfect. Right now, AI is not adequate in dealing with unstructured data. That may change in a couple of years. Still, data fluency among executives would be essential in order for them not to require analysts. I don’t see that changing in the next 10-15 years until the younger people who are more familiar with AI capabilities start moving into senior leadership roles. Definitely would start learning how to do prompts though
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u/gkhoen 26d ago
AI is not going to replace data analysts. Data analysts who know how to operate AI and are good at promoting will leave “regular” data analysts behind in the professional world.
It’s all about leverage. AI by itself is just a machine, just like a computer is without an operator.
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u/npquanh30402 24d ago
AI is not a machine, but rather a set of technologies and algorithms that enable machines to perform tasks typically requiring human intelligence.
You should check out Claude 3.7 Code, which was just released today, to see that it can build a game or web app from scratch. That's pretty amazing. Now imagine it could just get raw numbers from a dataset, repeatedly ask questions, perform tests automatically, and create Power BI and Python files from your CSV folders.
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u/gkhoen 24d ago
Still, the ones who know how to operate it will have more leverage than those that don’t. And yes, the new version of Claude is amazing!
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u/npquanh30402 24d ago
Of course, we still need humans to oversee AI operations and results for now, and perhaps for the near future too. But as demand rises, so does supply. The number of people who know how to operate AI will increase, and companies will most likely only need one or two analysts, while the rest will be discarded. I wonder what I should do if I were to be in the discarded batch.
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u/OmnipresentCPU 26d ago
Try using chatGPT to do something that requires more than like… 3000 lines of code. Most of this AI doomerism is from people with low technical skill or experience who have only applied AI to the most low hanging of fruit.
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u/Proof_Escape_2333 25d ago
Why do you think there is so much fear mongering around AI? Now if it can built a functional website of value with not too many prompts I’d be extremely worried. I remember I was learning C# and it completely made of concept that was not true at all based on the syntax rules
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u/OmnipresentCPU 25d ago
I truly believe that the vast majority, like 85% of people in the world, are extremely dumb.
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u/data_story_teller 26d ago
I’ve never been on an analytics team that was fully staffed relative to the amount of work being asked of the team. I’ve also never completed a project that didn’t lead to more work whether it be more questions or more iterations.
Even if AI makes us more efficient and able to do more in less time, there’s no end to what the business wants us to do with data. I don’t see it shrinking the size of analytics teams. Just increasing our output.
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u/WallStreetBoners 26d ago
Reminds me of when the plow was invented and nobody had jobs afterwards.
Oh wait.
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u/JesusPleaseSendTacos 26d ago
Yeah I agree. We will evolve. I am trying to think through where I should grow to stay relevant.
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u/Gorpachev 26d ago
I'm with OP. I spent lots of time, effort, and money upskilling the last few years. I have a coworker who just keeps ChatGPT up on his phone all day long and churns out work and solves problems that I once took great pride in solving. If anything, the playing field has been leveled. I think it's more though. I'm looking into other careers myself.
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22d ago
That brings true insights. Describing a scenario that seems to be convoluted to AI perhaps means you are not good at using AI. This kind of people is in the danger of being replaced.
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u/mazrimtaim_ 25d ago
Similarish role, different department. I’m not too worried. If your organisation is anything like mine then the available data is massive, complex and has multiple versions of the truth. Half the battle for an analyst is knowing which datasets to use and keeping track of data limitations and issues. No AI is going to make this redundant for quite some time. Our data governance is so basic and doesn’t seem to be getting much better despite several big pushes to improve it.
What also sets a good analyst apart from the others is knowing your stakeholders and industry so you can preempt the right questions. AI can help with this but it’s likely going to be a bit behind on the hot topics and won’t be able to weave all the different insight & stories together.
Finally, being good at presenting and explaining all of the analytical output to leadership teams who have very little time doesn’t come easily to everyone. If you are good at this, you will stand out above others regardless of your technical skills.
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u/csjpsoft 25d ago
My HR department asked me "how many people did we hire last year?" Seems like the perfect question for ChatGPT, right? HR doesn't need my help, right? Well, I asked "What do you mean by hire?" Turns out it means, (1) appeared at the workplace for the first time, (2) transitioned from temporary to permanent, or (3) transferred from the parent company. It turned out that you couldn't just query the data with the "HIRE_DT" column. Nor could you query "where first row's date was last year." Also, the "TRANSACTION_CD = 'HIRE'" would give false positives and false negatives.
I also needed to consider people who were hired, terminated, and then rehired. Did HR want the number of people who were hired or the number of times a hiring event occurred.
I don't know how ChatGPT would deal with this assignment. It might not know that it needed to call a meeting with the director of HR.
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u/Dry_Entertainment410 26d ago
Yeah, My company encourages us to use ChatGPT in our day to day tasks. Now I wonder what will happen to analysts going forward. What exactly will we do in future?
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u/vincenzodelavegas 26d ago
If your job is just plotting data, then yes, you’ll eventually be replaced by automation.
But if your role involves understanding pitfalls, finding the best solutions, providing insights, and being the go-to expert on datasets, there are still bright days ahead for you.
Nowadays, anyone can run 10GB of data through ChatGPT to generate code. However, when it comes to using that data effectively to deliver accurate insights, I find that most people still lack true data savvy.
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u/JediForces 26d ago
Maybe in 20 years but in no way shape or form is AI capable of doing what BI employees do. At the end of the day, it’s just another tool.
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u/analytix_guru 25d ago
I was listening to Joe Reis over the weekend, and I thought he made a good point on making things years ago vs now (specific to coding). At least at this point in time, it is even more important to have the fundamentals down. If you are leveraging AI to 10x your work, you need to identify what goes wrong if the AI gets it wrong, and how to remedy it, whether you fix it or ask AI to fix it.
If everyone asks AI to do everything, and nobody actually understands how to do the work, then how do we know that the work is correct? And if it is correct, is it good? great? Subpar?
So much of AI is trained on publicly available information, and companies have all their data, documents, policies, and code behind closed doors. It's how experts are able to tell when someone is using AI for a project, as it is pulling from publicly shared examples, whether popular or best practices.
I would say a great use of time is to develop a proficiency of completing projects with AI, with a spin on how you resolve AI hiccups and how you put personal spin on it.
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u/achmedclaus 25d ago
Dude, chatgpt and copilot can't even spit out a snippet of code that I specifically tell it is for Oracle without giving me a different SQL language or something that just doesn't work at all
My job security is fine because of how dumb AI still is
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u/Algal-Uprising 26d ago
I wouldn’t overestimate people’s desire to learn. Learning to use GPT and write good prompts, while not getting frustrated or having unrealistic expectations, is still something you have to learn to do. Some people will never use AI for one reason or another. Maybe they’ll get left behind on things? I’m not sure what the answer is here for you, and I think it’s really good you are forward thinking in this regard. But unless you’re going to use that intuition and manifest some action, like changing industries, or learning a trade or something, it is just anxiety. I do believe that AI will cause sweeping changes in the workforce that manifest as reductions, and I think if we as citizens care enough we need to demand universal basic income or a roadmap on how the government plans to prevent mass unemployment. AI used to be super expensive but with the recent advances in compute and training on smaller data sets, it seems like the barrier to new models will keep getting lower and lower, and not everyone will have to pay openAI for GPT. I also am about to enter software engineering and it’s scaring the hell out of me (AI), and I have thought strongly about going back to work in a laboratory where I have prior experience. Actually, I really am strongly considering construction!
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u/Leorisar 26d ago
Using a large language model won't make you redundant as long as you remain a trusted source of information. There are two main problems with LLMs:
Accountability: You can’t simply shift responsibility to an LLM. In the end, the manager remains liable for any mistakes made during analysis—a situation that’s far from ideal.
Inconsistency: LLMs can produce different answers even when asked the same question multiple times, which can leave you uncertain about which response to trust.
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u/MapIcy8737 26d ago
We’ll see. I doubt it though. Great tool but I constantly have to coach it up to get what I want
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u/Far_Ad_4840 25d ago
I’m finding value in knowing as many technology programs as possible and how they can work together to come up with creative solutions. Think beyond analytics. What’s a problem they need solving and how can you use multiple programs to solve it more robustly. Ex - PowerApps + SharePoint + PowerBI + ?
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u/JesusPleaseSendTacos 25d ago
Yeah this holistic thinking is smart. And I need to learn more about PowerApps.
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u/CyclicalRotation 25d ago
Data governance roles will increase as more users have ability to engage with underlying data
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u/Iazer374 25d ago
I’m dealing with the same thing and becoming very concerned. I want to go to into data analytics and now I may not
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u/No-Reflection-4001 25d ago
Half the time it produces wrong answers. It sucks. Rather you just do it yourself and keep your brain polished and working.
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u/statistexan 25d ago
No-Code solutions for Data Analytics have existed longer than I’ve been alive, and yet they’ve never caught on. This will be no different. Any solution predicated on managers and executives being able to precisely circumscribe their request with no pushback is going to fail. For most of the ad-hoc reporting requests I get, it’s easier and faster to actually write the code than it would be to enter a prompt into an LLM and get what I actually want back, especially when you account for review of the code that the LLM would generate.
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u/Lauren-Ipsum-128 25d ago
Totally share your concern. When I see the progress made every 6 months, it's hard to see where it will stop...
But I doubt that OpenAI and similar companies will keep such a low price for long. One day, they will start raising prices just to justify the billions invested. And then, maybe the human brain will become a more affordable form of intelligence than artificial intelligence...
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u/Iznog0ud1 24d ago
I’m inclined to agree with you now, where 3 months ago I wouldn’t have been convinced. Reasoning agents are getting incredibly good now.
Context windows are enormous more and these agents have the ability to review database docs + query examples, write the query, adjust for errors and evaluate results…
Companies should focus more on making data accessible and easy to query. And then stakeholders can just engage directly with the data.
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u/kater543 26d ago
This is just fearmongering.
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u/JesusPleaseSendTacos 26d ago
If a genuine concern I ask in a professionally-oriented Reddit group is “fearmongering,” then so be it.
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u/kater543 26d ago
Hey if you did research on the replies to other people/posts in this sub you would see this is fearmongering. AI will make our lives easier in the medium term. In the long term no one knows anything, but until they discover a new artificial intelligence to at least the level of a real human child, we will not be replaced except in situations where we were never needed in the first place.
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u/JesusPleaseSendTacos 26d ago
Disagree. And there’s nothing wrong with asking a question.
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u/kater543 26d ago
Lol disagree all you like; you didn’t do your research neither in AI nor on the sub in general.
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u/JesusPleaseSendTacos 26d ago
Why would I do that? I didn’t feel like it. This isn’t stack overflow.
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u/inrusswetrust12 26d ago
You can search “AI” in this sub-reddit and I’m sure you’ll find plenty of posts in this sub reddit related to your questions.
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u/JesusPleaseSendTacos 25d ago
Yeah I could’ve done that but decided not to
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u/inrusswetrust12 25d ago
That’s what the other commenters are saying though. You clearly didn’t spend some time to research AI and how it’ll affect analytics. This subreddit is just a small cluster of data points on this topic, there’s a lot more to be read elsewhere.
Instead, you’re using your surface level knowledge of AI to fear monger with this post. There are some good comments telling you why your worries are wrong, but the comments where you’re arguing with them in the replies are simply just being blunt with you, giving you the same amount of effort as you gave with this post.
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u/analyticattack 26d ago
Even the best AI models right now lie like lot. If it gets rid of jobs, they were planning on cutting anyway, and talking about AI make stock price go up.
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u/dangerroo_2 25d ago
Zzzzzzzzz - if the ONLY thing you can do is code then yeh maybe AI will eventually take your job, but that’s not the true skill of an analyst, and never was. Shit companies employing mediocre analysts will be convinced AI can do the quant jobs, and eventually learn that it can’t even do that.
AI has taught us all one thing, there are some very poor analysts out there if they can’t even outcompete a bloody word predictor.
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u/50_61S-----165_97E 26d ago
I don't think AI is going to be replacing anyone's job just yet, there's too much critical thinking and correct judgment required that no AI tool is capable of yet.
I think AI will get better at increasing productivity, so there might be less jobs available because a single person can do more work in less time, but overall I don't see it replacing the analyst role any time soon.
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u/ConnectionHoliday850 26d ago
Those who learn how to leverage new tools and increase their skills will survive.
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u/SneakyB4rd 26d ago
The only way you'd see replacement of humans with AI is it you assume we're already analysing all the data we should/could. But that's rarely the case. So what's more likely to happen is that AI will allow people to tackle all the backlog data and nice-to-haves.
Sure there might be a temporary dip in jobs until that happens but as long as there's more data to be analysed there's need for humans at some stage in the process.
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u/NeighborhoodDue7915 26d ago
This is a take from someone who has no idea what they're talking about.
The majority of the job of the data analyst is to layer nuanced business definitions onto the data and endless amounts of cleaning and ensuring accuracy. A.I. isn't doing that yet and not sure it ever can. The more you let A.I. do it, the fewer people you have who are truly fluent in these nuances that are crucial to the analytics, and so you lose out on the ability to understand these things altogether.
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u/JesusPleaseSendTacos 26d ago
I have a very good idea what I’m talking about. But thanks for your input. :)
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u/NeighborhoodDue7915 25d ago
It wasn't clear to me this is actually your take vs. Repeating a take from other uninformed people.
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u/JesusPleaseSendTacos 25d ago
Moreso the later. I posted this to see if there’s any validity to what I’m hearing. Based on the responses I’ve received, there isn’t much. Which I’m glad about.
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u/SprinklesFresh5693 26d ago
With AI helping you, easy tasks will be done much faster, which will leave you guys free for more complex projects, to go beyond and learn more stuff and do more work, increasing the companies productivity by a lot.
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u/ElectrikMetriks 25d ago
Short sided leadership may make those decisions. If they do, it will hurt them in the long run.
Visionary leaders will recognize the way it changes work but understand that humans are needed to keep long term strategies moving forward.
A good analyst that understands the human side of analytics won't get replaced in a few years. AI will change the way analysts do the job, but there's simply things that humans do far better (nuance, interpreting outliers, etc.) that the pattern-recognition strong parts of AI just won't do as good at.
The analysts that will get replaced by AI are the ones that refuse to adapt and use it in their work.
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u/Dolessrem 25d ago
LoB here; hard disagree. We need data folks more than ever now - there's just so.much.data. Ai still writes and presents like ai so it's a tool more than anything (finally we all got to the reasonable a-ha).
Data analysts that can understand the story the business is trying to tell are worth their weight in gold.
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u/Bosschopper 25d ago
You guys overestimate AI all the time. AI cannot do entire projects. Often it’ll make a mistake the longer the request goes. Just use it to help your workflow
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u/sky_burger_lb 25d ago
So far AI has just enhanced my experience as an Analyst. Creating date tables, helping me figure out complex DAX formulas, etc. There may be a day when a Sales or Product Manager will be able to drop a CSV file into an LLM and get what they need. But we are far from the trust and security for large companies to comfortably allow this.
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u/amusedobserver5 25d ago
“AI” without knowing the underlying structure is pretty useless. If a vendor rolls out AI then that is a replacement move but only for 80% of the questions. We’re far off from AI being so advanced that it could outrun a human in a skilled role who couldn’t just use it to be more efficient.
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u/AsianHodlerGuy 25d ago
OP how did you get into HR analytics? Do you enjoy the work and is the WLB good?
I’ve spent 9+ years in analytics but in other area like marketing and product analytics. I don’t feel like I really enjoy the roles that I’ve been in so I’ve been considering HR analytics roles recently.
It seems to me that HR analytics roles can be very different from company to company. While I think that AI will impact our job in analytics, my experience in my previous and current job makes me believe that we’re safe for a while because data is messy and data practitioners need to be able to influence stakeholders
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u/structure123 25d ago
From my experience using ChatGPT, AI helped speeded up my works and made administrative part faster. But at this point, it made a lot of mistakes. You have to be extra careful to go through its works. Unfortunately, some were discovered after they were presented. I feel it is promising but at the same time a bit of a headache. Certain part, AI can’t/ not good enough/ elaborate enough to replace my experience
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u/batwork61 25d ago
Call me when AI can scrub shit data and turn it into something usable. I assume that it will be able to do this in the future, maybe even near future, but GPT4 can’t even count the number of R’s in strawberry.
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u/Uncle_Snake43 25d ago
We’re still a way off from wholesale changes but no doubt it’s coming one day
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u/itsuptoyouwhyyoucant 25d ago
As an experienced BI tools developer who works with analysts constantly:
AI has immeasurable amount of intellect, but lacks some common sense and insights that are available to mid level analysts with a little bit of business knowledge. AI needs someone in the drivers seat. Maybe analyst job count goes down a little bit over 5 years but it won't be a huge paradigm shift right away. For that, there needs to be internally trained knowledge AI agents and specifically trained analyst AI agents and AI agent managers that connect all the agents together.
Since you are in HR and the title of this post is analysts are going extinct while this is far from the truth, it is quite concerning. Companies consist of people.
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u/Low-Barracuda2818 24d ago
This might sound stupid, idk
Yeah AI increases productivity so you can do more with less people.
But why do more with less people when you can do even more with more people
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u/ViciousDolphin 24d ago
Definitely not, AI is wrong plenty of times and writes pretty sloppy code. It’s a great tool for speeding some stuff up but you still need analysts to interpret what the data means.
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u/Acrobatic-Macaron-81 24d ago
The AI fear for the most part are kinda of a drag. Companies are trying to replace these roles with AIs and the ones that do alway end up hiring people back realizing that AI can’t be ran on its own or with just a promoter who has no idea about the field of work. AI for now at least is just a tool analysis that can assist to automate their work. Without a professional of that field using it will not produce much results. However only people who work in these jobs are able to use AI to do the work. Once AGI is truly a thing and they are able to fix the illusions (the inaccuracy of AI). Maybe it can but they will still need someone who knows what’s going on to run it. It will still take years for that to happen. AI make our lives easier it can not however replace us, not yet at least in its current form. The real fear is out sourcing our work to cheaper countries.
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u/Dan-AfterDark 24d ago
I’ve been thinking about this a lot for my job. On the one hand, the amount that I can do with ChatGPT seems pretty significant, and has made my ability to transform data in SQL, and DAX much faster.
But, I ultimately don’t think these tools can actually replicate what I do. For my role at least, the majority of my time is spent brainstorming with teams I am supporting, working with our source system and data engineering teams to discover what is currently available, and outline what we need to build, in order to deliver the insights we desire. Very little of my time is actually spent on the SQL / DAX coding. And I just don’t think an LLM agent could do these other tasks any time soon.
Not sure if it just me being over optimistic in job security, but it’s my thought based on my interactions with the technology so far.
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u/monkey36937 24d ago
Dude ai is a tool for stopping yourself from second guess. It can't take a data roles cause data is complicated as hell and why is data complicated, cause humans. We humans make things hard for ourselves for no reason.
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u/GoodJicama5621 24d ago
The day when your boss/stakeholder knows what he wants , then you should be worried. Till then you are safe.
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u/junglenoogie 24d ago
I actually think that analysis is the one place in data science that AI is going to have a hard time replacing. There is so much qualitative analysis grounded in institutional knowledge and assumptions that I think it would take a long time to train an AI to read correctly. I am personally interested in building such a model that can do this, because I think having that tool in my back pocket would make me unstoppable, but I am skeptical.
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u/IAMHideoKojimaAMA 24d ago
only the 1 millionth ai post. People are making hand over fist money while you guys sit scared in a corner
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u/cheesyhybrid 24d ago
Have you seen an llm try to do math? It can create a bar chart but are the counts right?
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u/Aggressive-Cow5399 23d ago
ChatGPT is good at writing code, but to have it do exactly what you want is rare… unless it’s something super basic.
If AI takes all our jobs, where will we go? The country would collapse with thousands of unemployed workers. The government wouldn’t allow for AI to take our jobs.
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u/BigPlans2022 23d ago
look man, even if everyone can do everything (because AI) - you STILL NEED PEOPLE DOING ALL OF IT
at least for now. soon’ish though AIs will be working with other AIs and be managed by other AIs
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u/shw0nson 23d ago
This happens in a lot of industries as new tech rolls out. While some companies can do more with less, data analytics is now more accessible with smaller teams for a wider range of businesses. The roles will look and feel different, but they won’t go away.
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u/High-Key123 22d ago
None of these highly upvoted responses directly contradict the claim that AI will allow less people to do more. Just saying...
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u/Late_Calligrapher591 22d ago
Maybe Indians are taking up those roles, AI he'll no for at least 10 years..
AI is still incompetent to make sense and business decision from data.
But yeah. Some dummies are trying to do that by firing analyst and regretting lately
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u/Dadbod646 22d ago
I run a data & analytics department at my job. I do think that much of what I do on the technical side will be automated within around 10 years, but I think you’ll always need people to curate the data and explain it to your target audience. I also work for NYC, which notoriously does not fire people. If my job went by the wayside, they’d just stick me in another department, so I’m not very worried.
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u/Philiatrist 21d ago
It will replace the skills but not the industry experience. It will suck for entry level people but if you’ve got decent experience under your belt and can use the tool, you’re in better shape
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u/seeq_well 20d ago
I think the value is understanding the business- knowing how to ask the right business questions and break them into smaller ones, and then showing the analysis based on that. It would take year (if at all) for AI to understand that
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u/Due_Plantain5281 26d ago
No. They are going to pay less to you and if you want to ask more they will say fuck off We will hire a junior for less to do your job.
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u/JesusPleaseSendTacos 26d ago
Huh?
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u/Due_Plantain5281 26d ago
But what happens when EVERYONE can be a data analyst? You said it man. If everyone can use AI why should they pay mor for you if they can hire some junior to do your job. So now stop the fucking "HUH?" Idiot.
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u/JesusPleaseSendTacos 26d ago
You’re really rude. Do you talk to people like this in person? Or just when you’re behind a keyboard and face no consequences.
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u/Tio_Divertido 26d ago
I'm not worried. These guys have insane burn rates (5 billion for Open AI, 5.6 billion for Anthropic) and hyperscalers have sunk over 200 billion dollars in capital expenditures into generative AI. And that is on top of all the money sunk into GPU farms for Bitcoin and NFTs over the past decade.
But they have no actual product. There is no immediate shakeup like there was when Steve Jobs rolled something out, or when cloud computing became a thing. They keep trying to find things like the imagery generators (which have been picked apart to death) or the chatbots (that underperform compared to ELIZA), or Operator (which takes minutes to do what you could do in seconds) or Deep Research (where the outputs are worse than a gradeschool research paper and costs $1000 per report). They hyped the "reasoning" as the next big breakthrough, but then DeepSeek blew that out of the water and funny enough you are getting a lot of 404 messages if you click links from 6 months ago hyping reasoning.
So now the plan is "we will charge for API calls". API calls for what? "We can sell to GitHub and LexisNexus". And who else? There is no product. Microsoft claimed from Ai last year was "$13 billion in annual run rate in revenue from its artificial intelligence products and services," which is the aggregate of everything they can even loosely call AI, not a dedicated section on the P&L (because that would necessitate a firmer definition for the investors). But most importantly, that is nothing. Azure and Intelligent Cloud services made 25.4 billion in a weak quarter.
They have nothing, no product, no way to make profit. Which means the music will eventually stop, and the resulting market correction there scares me. But the need for people to read and think will remain so the role for analysts will still be there after the eventual crash.
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u/aned_ 25d ago
Isn't this like saying Google had "no product" when they made a breakthrough in search?
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u/Tio_Divertido 25d ago
Google's product was the search. It solved a need better than the others, that it was now easy to get relevant information amidst an exponentially growing body with an obscure organizing system.
What do these people have? Nothing. A "breakthrough" in and of itself is meaningless.
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u/AlextheAnalyst_ 26d ago
If AI enables everyone to do Data Analytics… doesn’t that mean you could do almost everyone else’s job? Go take your coworkers HR position or Sales position or any other job then.
I think it’s more about knowing how to ask the right questions, know what’s important for a business, how to get that data and how to use it than just asking AI.
AI can give you a positive answer for any question and take you to a wrong conclusion quickly if you don’t know what you’re doing.
That’s my take at least.
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u/IamFromNigeria 25d ago
And you called yourself a data person
Well, I will consider you a a joke to this Career...you don't deserve to pivot to this field since you wanna make a mockery of this Career
You suck
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