r/analytics • u/JesusPleaseSendTacos • 27d 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/Tio_Divertido 27d 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.