State of AI in Analytics | Will AI be the End of Data Analysts?

hello everybody I am your host Alex Friedberg and this is the Alex the analyst show thank you so much for joining me today we're going to be talking about the state of AI in analytics now there is a lot to cover and I mean I have my notes Here I have pages of notes on just about everything we're gonna be talking about things like chachibiti's code interpreter Microsoft's copilot 365 which should be released in not too long we're gonna be talking about the positives and the negatives that I personally see with just artificial intelligence in general and Analytics then we're gonna be talking about some of my predictions uh and kind of where I think a lot of people should be focusing a lot of their time and energy in the coming months and years as these things progress so there's a lot to talk about um again uh if you haven't seen one of these shows now this is not like my regular episodes where they're like 15 minutes or less this is my Alex the analyst show where I just talk um and we just have a conversation you can grab some coffee I just have water today I usually have like tea or something um but we just chat and this one to me is extremely important um just let you guys know I had had something planned to talk about maybe two months ago I had it all written out um and I kind of started second guessing myself I was like I need to do more research I need to really dive into this more because I don't want to come to you guys just you know with my initial knee-jerk reaction and just kind of tell you what I'm thinking I really wanted to have especially for something as important as this I really wanted to have some um just a better perspective on things and really be grounded in what I believe and what I think in this area um it's been a very interesting past six months um I've seen I I really I hear I get a lot of feedback from the community whether it's LinkedIn Twitter Instagram YouTube I get a lot of feedback and there's just been a lot of worry a lot of you know what's happening is like our job's okay should I still be studying should I still be learning these things or should I just choose a totally different career path um that's my cat and those are all very very normal things to think about honestly if I was at the very beginning of my career right now and I didn't know as much as I know now I might have a very different outlook on things so I have a lot of information my cat's being weird right now she's like staring at me through the crack of my door but I have a lot of information to cover a lot so just stick with me hang out um I think it'll be a really interesting conversation I'm gonna post a lot of this stuff to LinkedIn as well um you know when this goes live but um with that being said let's kind of start off with just you know what are things looking at right now now as of this recording it's May 8th of 2023 I'll probably release this next week um but you know it's um it's May basically things have changed so much even in previous months two months ago when I was writing this some of these things weren't announced yet things like Microsoft copilot 365. things like Chachi BT's code interpreter these things are just recently coming out and there's other things like Auto GPT baby GPT and some other things that we're going to talk about as well so really quickly I want to mention some of these Technologies what they're doing why people are concerned about it um and then I'm gonna really go into like my positive negatives on these types of Technologies and what I think is actually going to happen those are my predictions first thing I want to talk about is uh chat gbt's code interpreter now usually I don't do any overlays I'm leaning forward so much um normally I don't do any overlays in these types of things I just tell it how it is I'm going to try to give you a little demonstration of what this is uh on the screen in front of you but job gbd's code interpreter is chachuity's newest uh kind of plug-in integration that they're releasing and a lot of people are saying it's basically a data analyst for twenty dollars a month and so it's you know has a lot of enhanced abilities you can feed it a lot of different things things like files are going to be able to start feeding into it um and so that's and they're saying it's a data scientist for 20 a month so they're basically like you know that's what it is it's supposed to be somebody who analyzes data which is really interesting then we have Microsoft copilot 365 which is basically just chat gbt inside of all of Microsoft's products uh so it's going to be in uh let me see word excel PowerPoint teams Outlook and more as you know they integrate these things they'll probably be in Azure as well power bi all their Technologies really then you have things like Auto GPT and baby GPT now this one's a little bit more Niche not as many people know about this one but basically the premise of it is that you are creating these little Bots with chat gbd's functionality and these little agents is what they call them and the Agents go out and they do a specified task and then when they're done they are done right but you can have multiple of them and the Agents themselves can create like sub agents to do smaller tasks and so you can tell it hey go and do this entire task and do this this and this and this and it'll go and do all of those things and it'll come back and it'll be done so really really interesting I've actually kind of dabbled in that myself I got it onto my computer I set everything up um it was pretty tough in my opinion people were making it seem really easy online um but I actually found it quite difficult with that being said these are all technologies that are like just kind of starting to come out um and these are the types of things I think people are most worried about is some type of you know one product that can literally just be a data analyst um and so I'm going to be talking about that in a little bit um but that is as of right now that is like that's where we're at that's the state of AI and analytics is people are just worried um and that's on the you know our side of things which is the employees the people who want to become data analysts who are data analyst you know will they have a job in six months a year five years will there be jobs we're going into if you're getting a degree in data analytics or a degree in data science or these things you know are there going to be jobs for this in the future again extremely extremely extremely understandable um what I want to go into right now is kind of the negatives um the the things that I see are negative to a good outcome with these types of Technologies for data analysts like us I'm just going to preface this by saying I have a lot of positives I have some really interesting predictions um but the negatives I think are very real right I think they're pretty obvious too and I think once I start talking about them you're gonna be like if you haven't thought about them before you're gonna be like that makes a lot of sense uh the first thing is automation of repetitive tasks that's what a lot of um chat gbt's ability to automate things is just these repetitive tasks you know think um think like an accountant or a lawyer or somebody who writes something you're writing you're generating these things and it's a lot of repetitive things something that chat gbt is really really good at and so um you know one of the biggest things that a lot of people pointed to or the negative sign I can see this is that there actually is a lot of Automation in analytics I did it myself when I first got into one of my previous roles I was like man a lot of this can be automated and that's what I started doing mostly with python but you know what a lot of people will say a lot of people are arguing and some of it I agree with is that there are a lot of automatable uh if that's a word there's a lot of things that can be automated in analytics um for the good or the bad I mean you know automation is is very very very useful right you don't have to do all these things manually and so now you can automate something to happen and it happens over and over again with consistency right that's a fantastic thing but you know one of the concerns um is that data analysters just so much repetitive work so many things that can be automated that literally you won't need a data analyst anymore um and I'll get to that I'll come back on that a little bit the next thing kind of the next negative the next thing that I see is that um gbt can actually do pretty good data analytics now I am going to come about it from my own personal perspective some negative and some positive the positive is that it can do Advanced data analytics I've seen it I've tried it out I've messed with it um I have a whole video out on chow gbz for data analytics and that's just like a basic here's how you can kind of use it but I've seen demonstrations I've also kind of gone and dived into it myself to do some more complex things and this is things like the code interpretergpt's code interpreter that's what it's really really good for is doing these a lot more complex things where it is right now today it's not perfect it just isn't and it can do a lot of things with basic information which is good right it's it's a good thing that it can do this basic information now in a year three years five years it's probably gonna get better that's my worry is that it gets so good that at least that's like this kind of argument is I get so good where it's like most people wouldn't need a data analyst you'll just go to this code interpreter plug in the data that you have ask a few questions and you're done um to kind of support that because I'm going to kind of play devil devs off get a little bit here to kind of support that some companies some businesses that's all they would really need they wouldn't need a full on you know a full-on network of databases they don't need a lot of these other things they just need somebody to analyze some excels for them or they need somebody to analyze some data sitting in a simple database that's where I think this is actually going to come in really well for those people and might reduce the need for additional people to come in and analyze their data when they can do something like this and their data is like not crazy crazy complex or even if it is somewhat complex like this stuff could potentially do that in the future now I mess around with it I watched a few videos on it and honestly it's impressive but I noticed there were several errors I was having to prompt it to fix errors I was having to prompt it to understand what the data actually was within the columns so it's not perfect right it just doesn't but it still is really impressive this is something that I could see a lot of people using even more than just the standard chat gbt um and especially as plugins come along and that's something I didn't really talk a lot about but plugins are you know allow chat GED to plug in to these different applications eventually most of the things on the internet potentially or even applications like I could see Snowflake and I could see data bricks and Azure all these things have these plugins where you can sit chat gbt on top of these things and it can pull in that data or read that data in and do a lot of things for it so that is definitely a potential negative a potential uh bad thing when it gets so Advanced it could potentially get so Advanced where it does a lot of this work the next thing is cost Effectiveness and efficiency it is no uh it's no surprise that data analytics and having a department on data analysts and employing data analysts and keeping up the software on everything is expensive right most people are expecting around 60 000 at the lower lower level entry level um 60 000 a year in US dollars for employment um most people want more they want 80 100 000 for senior levels you're gonna get 125 000 then you have managers then you have all of your Tech stacks and you have all of your Cloud compute you have um your software license that you need like there's a lot that goes into that and there's recruiting for those positions there's a lot of overhead for data analytics especially at large companies there's just a lot of overhead the biggest negative to something like this is that it's very cheap or negative to People Like Us data analysts people data scientists uh people in the that work in this data environment is that it's really really cheap uh to actually run chat gbt for like open AI or chat gbt or a lot of these other companies it's crazy cheap and it can do a lot of work very quickly so it's extremely cost effective it's extremely efficient for a lot of the overhead stuff let's say you can let's say right now it can do 50 of what a data analyst could do let's just say that's essentially you know thirty thousand dollars a year and they might pay like a thousand dollars for it to do all of these things so I mean that's just some random numbers right but if it's doing half of what you're needing to be doing and it's doing it extremely cheaply um that's a crazy thing for like employers to ignore right for companies to ignore that's really serious um so that's uh you know that's just I didn't talk about efficiency so much but it can do a lot let's say like it can do it a thousand times faster and let's say I can do an end-to-end project that you would do for you know it would take you two weeks and it could do it in 10 minutes right that for example would be a huge reason why someone would get this type of system in their company and they would start using it because they can get things done so much faster incredibly fast that's something that a human just can't do so that is a huge positive for Automation and a negative four data analysts next thing is continuous advancements in the technology right we're we're very early on um and this will I'll talk a lot about this in my predictions uh section later but there's a lot of things that are going to happen in the next several years just within the past six months so much has happened um it's it's been really tough to keep up with even for myself and I keep up with it a lot like I'm always on top of it I'm I'm leaning in a lot today I'm like this um there's a lot that's come out and these are just to name a few but things are escalating at a pace I I really haven't seen before um I think it's just because this technology is so it's so uh it's not unique to one area it's being used in all areas I think that's what's so unique about it it's every type of work whether you're in paralegal whether you are in you know um accounting banking fintech whatever there's a everybody's using it in some way um and it's spreading so quickly it's like everybody is trying to create the next best thing and again I don't know how to describe it because it's just fascinating how incredibly fast this is moving um and so you know as these things progress they may get better and better and better and better and better and even better than they are today I'm sure they will be in a year they'll be a lot better than they are today so that's a genuine worry um because we can't keep up data analysts cannot learn as fast as AI is going to learn ever that's a very genuine concern um so to kind of summarize at least the negatives and I call them negatives but they're negatives for us and they're positives for others right small business owners companies they can save a ton of money uh they can do a lot of things we don't need the overhead of hiring somebody to do it it'll be a lot faster a lot cheaper um I mean that's essentially what a is promising right and that's what everyone's worried about they're like goodness gracious I mean you know if this technology is it does what people are hyping it up to do um I'm not gonna have a job I you know so that's it's a really tough pill to swallow uh to really I'm and I'm trying to be like as real as I possibly can be here um just because this is a very serious topic I'm smiling I'm laughing but this is an extremely serious topic um legitimately and so now I kind of want to go away from the negatives for just a little bit it'll kind of be in there but I want to talk more about the positives of AI um just for job stability in general um as a data analyst not as an employer as a data analyst here are some of the positives when I'm looking at AI when I'm working with these Technologies and I've been testing out a ton I'd keep I want to reiterate that like I I'm not just seeing stuff online and kind of like spitting it back out like I'm testing all of these things myself here's one of the biggest positives uh for us is right now ai is not perfect it's going to make a lot of mistakes um and when I say a lot of mistakes on the surface level from everything that I've seen everything that I've tried um not just try but all the demonstrations that I've seen is it always makes some mistake um on the very bottom level like the lowest level simple analytics it gets it right and it's not it's not even uh it's not unimpressive it's still impressive but that type of technology has actually been around for a while um and I have seen it out there and people even before Chachi BT were worried about these types of Technologies you know coming into the main uh area and taking over and I'm like I've seen these things um and they've been around for since I've been at Dales for the past six years they've been around where they'll ingest some data excuse me they'll do some analytics they'll spit out some visualizations that actually is not new uh Chachi beauty is just making a lot more Center Stage right and so when you watch something like and I I suggest you look into these things and I'll try to leave links in the description for all these um like demos and stuff like that but chachidi's code interpreter is really impressive um but when you get your hands on when you start using it you'll notice it makes mistakes um and that is a really really strong positive for us right as data analysts as data scientists people in data world is it's going to make mistakes um and let's say in five years ten years it's making a lot less mistakes it's still gonna make mistakes um and for a lot of companies these little mistakes could be huge uh you know if you rely so much on this Auto this automation these analytics you're just kind of blindly trusting it that's a problem because if it starts making any type of mistake and you start blindly trusting it could lead to millions of dollars I mean literally millions of dollars in Lost Revenue in in um not just Revenue but you know we're talking about client retention we're talking about saving money spending money how you allocate your resources there's a lot of things that analytics uh goes into so you know just the fact that it's making mistakes even on not crazy complicated stuff or doesn't fully understand it or you really have to like dig in to make it understand or to make it know what you're trying to tell it you know it takes a lot of uh it makes mistakes and takes effort um the next thing that's uh kind of a positive at least I definitely see this as a positive is that AI can't do everything uh and it needs a lot of context and understanding from someone like me uh who's inputting it it needs a lot of understanding to really understand it now again I'm pointing back to the code interpreter because that one's actually somewhat new um but I was able to get my hands on and the code interpreter um it doesn't need a lot of context it tries to extrapolate as much information as it can from the information and the data that you've given it now if that data is well labeled if it comes with documentation and you give it a little bit of context it does a really good job the funny thing is though is I have not really ever worked in an environment where that is the case um and that's the positive right um the positive is just humans humans are human and we make mistakes therefore AI is not going to like just be really good at this stuff until it's AI everywhere in every Department doing everything which um I just I you know I don't see that happening anytime soon right so what I'm trying to get at is is that humans are feeding Chachi BT they're feeding AI what it needs to know in order to perform these Analytics and humans just get things wrong there's dirty data and and things like code interpreter can actually clean data but if they don't understand the nuances of the data they can't do it well and it makes mistakes that's you know just going back it makes mistakes and so you know it's really interesting that you know probably the biggest impediment the biggest roadblock for AI is just humans itself um we we just make a lot of mistakes um and you know I humans are always going to be part of the process I worked with Healthcare right humans are what's inputting data that makes mistakes humans are the ones you know um working on the front lines and putting in notes and and putting in things and doing these codes and all these different types of things within Healthcare and they just make a lot of mistakes and so you can train it on what to look for and automate certain processes but there are always going to be other errors there are always going to be different things that they need to figure out and learn from and train from and then those analytics there's a lot of nuances in business um this actually may be my next point uh it's actually not someone to talk about it is that every business or every use case within a business is different so from what I've seen from a code interpreter is you can give it the data you can ask it the questions and it'll give you some information but when you start getting a lot more specific on certain information that you're wanting to get out of it it sometimes is it needs more information and you're trying to ask certain questions and you're like okay I need more data I need more data I need data from here I need data from there so it can't give you everything just you have to feed it the right information and with that being said a business like the one I was working at we had a hundred different clients all wanting unique things they all wanted different things to be done with their data and so let me see how much time I got about 25 minutes so I'm or so so I'm just checking the time but it cannot solve for all of them and all the data is so intricately intertwined in databases and Excel spreadsheets and all these things from a client that you're gonna have to tie that all together put it in a manageable uh State you're gonna have to understand the business use case for that data to make sure you store it properly to make sure that you are cleaning it properly for that use case and so if you just ask chat you need to clean the data and you'll give it a ton more information about exactly what they're looking for exactly what they want it's going to have a really tough time doing it so a lot of that limitation is actually just human error and humans having to be there to help them understand the business context for the business use case make sure that the data is there now I can see some of those pieces AI really helping with you say hey I really want to extrapolate this information and you say can we get that with the data we have they're gonna be like no we need this other information so you have to go to the business you're going to say okay we need this type of information let's start a data collection process that's stuff that I worked on a lot with we need to collect this data let's set this up let's work with our data Engineers let's work with our database developers let's streamline this process get the data in and then you can feed it into something like Ai and say okay we have this data now let's loop back around to this business issue let's work through it um but again it's um it just can't do everything it can't and even if it does do a lot of things and it does a lot of things well it doesn't do everything perfect um so that's kind of a positive thing the next thing is human instinct and intuition it's actually in my opinion quite important um I think AI is going to help with this a lot it's going to help us kind of extrapolate information um and kind of I use it a lot for things like content creation or generating ideas I think this is actually going to be a really helpful tool for that but I think humans they just have something that AI doesn't which is just on just knowing things having that intuition in their back their head that just AI doesn't you know it's this it's this database it's this pool of information that's pulling from um and it's doing its best but it doesn't understand things right it's not like it's understanding what you're saying it's not coming up with um these new ideas these new things that nobody's ever thought of uh and in some ways it might um but for things like you know analytics there are going to be things where it's going to tell you hey go do this um because this is what we know to be best but your intuition is telling you something different and then you have to prompt you have to tell it you have to work with it to be like no I don't think that's right because of these things um and I think a lot of teams not just analytics are going to figure this out you know AI is going to be really confident and say hey here's some options but I think this one's the best you're like that doesn't sound right that doesn't that doesn't make logical in intuitive sense so just being human having that human instinct I think is actually really important something I don't think AI is going to have any time soon the next thing I'm going to read this word for work because I liked how I wrote it every company is extremely different there's no one solution which is what people think will happen every company every company's data is different their needs are different there will be hundreds of AI tools for analytics and companies will need multiple companies will need multiple AI tools for different uses but no one tool will solve all their problems and there will always be more problems um this is more just I I wrote this mostly because and again I like I I I'm trying I I'm really trying to grasp AI as a whole how is it how it's going to impact the business and and that's all my predictions will come up in just a second and that's where I think a lot of these things come from but I think that there's not gonna ever gonna be one solution I don't think Chachi BT is going to grow grow to where they're the one solution for everything I think for small businesses like one to ten maybe I'm just like 50 people there will be one or two solutions that they'll use for a lot of their work but I don't think there's ever going to be something like chat GPT employee who you can just go to is a black box for everything in analytics and get the answer to what's going to connect all your data sources it's going to do all the data cleaning you understand the business use case it's going to do everything and just get it done realistically in the future and I'm going to start kind of getting in my predictions realistically in the future every company is going to need something different there's so many completely unique companies out there um now I run my own company and I know that chat GB does not solve all my problems um and and it actually I use chat quite a bit I like it I really do um and and I see a lot of these other tools that are coming out I'm like man they're really impressive they're really good it just doesn't solve all of my problems I think when you start thinking about it from a business perspective not just a data analytics perspective from a business perspective there's going to be a lot of issues that you run into a lot of issues um and this is kind of the thing I'm positive about I'm actually I think this is a good thing for data analysts in general as a whole is that I'm going to take a step back businesses don't want managers they are not going to want managers doing this type of work using these AI tools even if there was a perfect data analyst tool out there they're not going to want managers doing that they're going to hire somebody to do that and most likely if they're a larger team they're going to want multiple people doing that fact checking fixing prompts they're going to make sure that the the data quality is high that these data pipelines are wrong or are correct and aren't aren't wrong there's gonna be a lot of things that you're going to want to double and triple check for in these things um so I mean I think I think just as a whole as a whole I think every company is very very different very different I was going down somewhere with that um but I started looking at my predictions and I wanted to get to these now okay prediction time um this part I I I really I've been adding to this over the past several months every every so often I'll run to something new I find and I keep running into these things I keep adding to it so here are my predictions I'm gonna start I don't know how I'm gonna talk about but I'll start my first prediction I think every company is wanting to utilize artificial intelligence and even will and even more so in the future for analytics I see this as a huge plus and an upside for data analysts like you and I I see that as a huge Plus because these companies don't have data teams and they now feel they need to create one to stay ahead so one of my predictions is that a lot of these one-man shows small companies small businesses are going to want to start using AI they are not going to want to do it themselves this technology is useful if you know what you're doing it is very difficult to use in my opinion still it's very difficult to use if you don't know what you're doing now when I come into this I'm coming in from a data analyst perspective I'm like wow this is really intuitive this is pretty easy to use that's because I'm very biased towards analytics I understand it I've been doing it for several years right and so I understand what it's doing I understand what it's telling me I understand all these things I've been doing it with that being said a lot of these business owners they don't they don't use data they don't use these AI tools and they're going to want somebody to come in and do that for them so I think that overall that's a really good thing um I actually I think this is a I think it's another point that I was talking about here yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna skip this is a totally different point that I have and I want to kind of merge these two my number five on here and I'll go back to two three four number five is every Department in a company is going to start using AI in some way and we want to optimize their data in that department um so I think we're gonna see and this is this one I thought is really interesting and I absolutely am like I'm like really convinced about this one we're gonna start seeing a lot more specified analytics roles and what I mean by that is is right now we have things like healthcare analysts marketing analyst financial analyst right those are specific I think we're going to get even more specific um I think we're going to start going down to like the department level I I'm talking mostly like these really large companies so at a Healthcare Company you're not just going to be a healthcare analyst or a healthcare AI analyst is what they might be called in the future um like five ten years who knows I think you'll get even more specific right within Healthcare you have claims data you have certain other uh breakoffs from that marketing within Healthcare um and typically you know you have these different Healthcare analysts Financial analysts like I said I think we're going to have more specific AI focused analytics in all these departments that didn't have analytics before um and people who weren't analysts before are going to become whether it's called an analyst or it's called an AI prompt uh analyst or something like that somebody who's working with the data that AI is working with helping it prompt it to get the right answers troubleshooting its errors um you know doing these data quality checks whatever you want to call it I I can absolutely see that happening in the future well that's 10 or 15 years down the road just every Department's going to want to use AI in some way AI needs data and every big company has a lot of it so I think we're again we're going to Niche down a lot more um that's kind of like I wrote down HR AI analyst I don't know if that one's gonna happen but that's kind of one of my predictions I think we're gonna get a lot more specific with what we're doing I don't think the term data analyst um in the future will be as broad as it is now I think you'll see mostly like um you know specific to Industries um my next prediction prediction is that I think data freelancing is going to become more popular more companies wanting AI not knowing where to look and the look to consultants and Freelancers to come in and help them build their systems and maintain them the maintenance piece is I think gonna be very important in the future I think you know as I talked about companies are going to want to use AI a lot of companies are going to want to use AI um I think that freelancing and Consulting in AI is going to be huge I think it's gonna be really big and as these tools as more and more tools come out because there's so few tools right now um that are and let me rephrase that there's so few tools that people have ever used or known about in the AI world but there's hundreds being built so I've seen a lot of them but I've used a handful of all the ones that are out there so every company is going to be very different and something I talked about earlier is that we're gonna have ai tools for different Industries very specific to their Industries to where it has more domain knowledge more understanding of what's going on they won't be perfect but they'll be much more specific to that area and so you're going to need somebody to maintain those systems troubleshoot all those things that we've been talking about you're going to need somebody so I think freelancing I think Consulting actually is going to become more popular in the data and AI world um and just a note on that and I'm looking at my notes a lot right now because I don't want to like say something that I didn't write down I want to make sure I'm sticking with white because these are like things I've like kind of curated um really and like genuinely thought about the next thing I noted is just that regular people are gonna try to do this and fail um as it gets more complex they're going to hire people with AI and analyst skill set to fill in those gaps I think the perception that I get is that this is going to make data analysts redundant or they're going to make data scientists redundant I've even seen data Engineers being redundant database developers like anything data related they're like it's going to be made redundant I don't I don't think that's accurate but I think is going to happen is the day in our system is going to get really good they're already pretty good um Excuse me give me one second I need some water they're already really good what I think is gonna happen now I can genuinely like I just see it I I can absolutely see this happening which is a lot of regular people like your neighbor or your HR guy they're gonna try to start using these Technologies and they're not going to be as intuitive as they think it is especially when you're working with complex data um it's going to be it's gonna be more complex it's going to be less understandable to a lot of people like again I'm trying to come at it from somebody who isn't an analytics who really understands creating dashboards and reports and the data and and the data collection process and all these things um these things are tough these things are really tough and it's going to help simplify those things but these things are going to be tough they're going to people are going to have to become data literate understand the data a lot more and so people who already have those fundamental skills that have been doing it that have been studying and creating projects all these things I think that um is really going to lend itself to transitioning towards these types of jobs that are going to be created um just because people want them people need them they see the need for AI in their company and then they're like whoa I don't know how to do this I need somebody to come in who understands this data who understands the business use cases to help me prompt these things and and get them all situated right and maintain them that's what I see my third prediction is I think it's going to lower the barrier of entry for analytics whether it's good or bad you can you know go both ways but I think this is going to increase expectations of both customer or the stakeholder is going to get so what do I mean by this I think that I think the first thing is self-explanatory but I think that the barrier of Entry to getting into analytics is going to be somebody who's re just understands the data well I think domain knowledge is going to become way more important than it did in previous years I've always told you that technical skills are really important and they are I'm going to talk about that in a little bit technical skills are still going to be important but I think if you really know the domain knowledge of let's say Healthcare I come from Healthcare if you really know the healthcare side of things and you have some data background you'll be able to get a job faster so somebody who was a doctor before somebody was a nurse before somebody who is um you know worked with on the data side of these things or has firsthand experience with these things are going to be able to transition into analytics easier because they understand that business practicalities that you need to know they understand I don't know if practicalities was the right word the business practices if they understand the business practices they understand how the day is collected how the data flows and then they start using these tools they start learning the data side of things I think the I think the barrier of entry for those people transitioning in is going to be a little bit lower because of these AI tools um the expectations that the customer are going to increase this one is I think is has always been true so I don't think there's anything new I'm not saying anything revolutionary here but here's what I will say when you start using these AI tools the expectation is that the quality is going to go up quite a bit they're paying for this technology that it's supposed to be state-of-the-art best that you can buy and there's their expectations are going to go up so you as a data analyst out there you know we're coming into a company they're going to expect that you know how to use these things really well to get exactly what they need out of them I think that is my part of my prediction in this and this is a sub note so I think this is actually going to cause a lot of frustration in the data world because I think so people are going to have such high expectations for AI in general and it's not going to get them 100 there um it just as of right now and where I see in the next five years ten years it's just not going to be perfect and there's a long way to go a long way to go for it to be really really good where it doesn't need as much oversight and hands-on experience or Hands-On um oversight is what I was saying that you wouldn't need something like a data anal so it needs a lot of work um and even then our company's gonna trust that it's really tough to say um and so the expectations are going to get a lot higher the next one I think that my number four is knowing analytics and the tools are become very important um as AI starts utilizing tools if something goes wrong you're going to need somebody who knows the systems and software well to troubleshoot and get it right now this is happening already with things like Auto gbt babygbt using these tools things like plugins within chat gbt which I think are going to be even more so and things like GitHub GitHub copilot Microsoft copilot 365 that's going to be integrating chat GPT into a lot of these things and a lot of their Microsoft applications what happens when something doesn't go right you need somebody who knows these tools well so what I foresee is people are going to hire people who already know these tools to come in and use them monitor them use them with AI so if they're wanting a p a power bi visualization specialist um I or let's say they're you know a very common job right now is a data visualization specialist data visualization specialist in my opinion are some of the easier jobs to automate in the data analyst sphere because data visualization from everything that I've seen is something that um AI gets pretty right or gets it better than others things like data cleaning it gets wrong um quite a bit it doesn't understand all the business side of things so having that domain knowledge but data visualization I feel like it gets it gets right more often than not now you still need to prompt it for other things you still need to create different types of visualizations for different things so I don't think that job entirely is going to go away I just I do think that that job specifically is more susceptible to being automated in my opinion um so I think knowing these tools though is still going to be extremely important because as you get into it more on a base level you could come in who somebody who knows none of these Technologies and they could kind of get by I think right which is impressive with AI they could kind of get by doing a little bit of data analysis but as you get into the more complex things and you're starting to integrate different tools like let's say it's you know writing all your python for you it's trying to create all your visualizations for you in a different tool it's creating data pipelines it's it's you know cleaning data you don't want just some random guy doing that that is still very specialized so you knowing these tools knowing how to use them how all these pieces fit together and helping these AI systems do that properly I think it's actually going to be really important I don't actually see that happening to that level like just somebody kind of knowing the tools and kind of piecing everything together for AI to do it I don't see that exactly happening for several years even then I you know it's it's tough for me to imagine AI being that good where you just need somebody to supervise I think it's still going to require human intervention going in helping with this work helping prompt them help them understand things um again I just don't see that happening I'm going to skip to number six um and I kind of I kind of mentioned this already um but again this is like my thoughts over the past several like months number six is I think more and more companies are going to try to use AI on their own and realize it's not that easy it's not just a plug and play and you get everything you need you need good data you need good pipelines in place you need someone who knows what they're doing as this continues to happen more and more companies will turn to data professionals to come in and help maintain these solutions that they thought they could do themselves um it's just a general sentiment that I've seen online is that people are going to do everything themselves or they're going to have ai come in and do everything for them I just um I personally don't see that happening I think that a lot of the and again a lot of it comes back to like time and accuracy managers small business owners people like me like I can't do everything myself I can't like I'm growing my business and there are things that even if I wanted to I couldn't automate it to be done I need to have someone even if I have them using AI tool I need them to come in and use it for me at least right now right let's imagine in you know and next thing I'm going to talk about is five years 10 years 15 years one of my predictions but you know as of right now I would need to hire them to come in and kind of manage that system I could I just I'm not going to do it myself that's ridiculous it does not make sense for me to do that for my company and it does not make sense for other people to do that in their company um and so as long as AI needs some oversight and it will need it for a long time that is I just I'm sure of that as long as it needs oversight there's a lot of work to be done and that's not going to be something that people just like regular people who have no idea what they're doing are just going to figure out um unless they study it a lot it's just I don't I don't see that happening um so this is where I'm going to get uh I I'm going to talk about predictions five years ten years in a little bit but I want to kind of bring us all back to about like five or six months ago um many of you guys may not know this how much time do I have okay many of you guys may not know this I'm I'm building a company right now my my consulting company right in analytics I'm also building a website called analystbuilder.com that's going to have uh you know courses and a lot of analyst focused things on there and about five months ago I literally like stopped and and as all these things were developing and I was like oh my gosh I don't know if I'm gonna have a job in two years very very genuinely like I I forgot almost a full week I was just like I don't want to say depressed I don't want to say that's the word but I very much was like oh my gosh I was having like an existential crisis like what do I do and I really more or less started worrying about my audience I was like I was like does this mean everyone who's like following my channel does this mean you know there's no future for them I mean I really I had this like really like serious moment where I was just like I don't know if this is I don't know what's gonna happen I really don't because things are advancing so quickly I couldn't keep up and it felt like at every turn things were getting better and things were getting better after that week I started I was like okay I gotta stop sitting on my butt and feeling sorry for myself I need to like really dive into this and seeing how viable this is because I I I believe I have a duty to you guys to inform you the best I possibly can like if I thought analytics was going away forever and they were all going to be automated I would bring you the honest truth as I dug into it more and I dug into it a lot as somebody who works who's worked on kind of every process in analytics from data collection to data cleaning to business side developer side um visualization I feel like I've worked on a lot of different areas you know the more I started using it and trying it out in these different areas I'm like man this uh is extremely impressive but I can already see a lot of cracks a lot of cracks and something that I kept finding over and over and over again over the past four or five months that I've really been diving deep into it is that AI is just not I I don't see it taking over I don't see it let me rephrase that I'm not taking over I don't think that's the right word I don't see it replacing data analysts fully I see it being a huge tool and asset but I also see a lot you know I see those fears and concerns because I was in that exact place like four months ago five months ago I was in the exact same place very much worried I was like not just for my not just for me it was more like I mean I I feel like I'm a teacher on YouTube that's how I feel I feel like I teach people data analytics to help go out there and get a job that they want and that they love and that they'll enjoy doing I'm like is all everything I've built is all the people that I've been teaching are they just is there no future for them and I from my personal opinion as of right now on March 8th of 2023 I really don't see that happening I don't think um I don't think we're looking at Mass layoffs soon what I genuinely think is going to happen is it's going to be a somewhat slow roll out even though that technology is advancing very quickly I think the rollout of it being integrated into all these companies is actually going to be a lot slower than you'd imagine and I think as um they roll out a lot of these artificial intelligence chat GPT llms whatever you want to say as they roll these out into companies we're going to find a lot more issues we've been using this personally on a personal scale once you start integrating into companies you're going to find a lot more issues with privacy ethical concerns errors hallucinations which have not gone away and I haven't even touched on but that's part of the mistakes it still makes hallucinations um I think that we're going to find a ton of issues a ton and over time those will get better but my prediction in the next five years from now until five years so we're looking at 2028 I see AI systems starting to be integrated at most companies within the next five years or integrated in companies the next five years I don't see on I don't see many data analyst jobs being replaced fully I think that there may be a small slight slowdown in hiring an AI in data analysts in the future now there are people that retire there are people that come in there's already there has been for the past six years since I've been in data analytics there's already been a tough barrier of entry for entry level who have no experience I think that'll always be there um so I don't see any different in the next five years what I will say is data analysts who have experience entry level mid-level senior level you're going to find more opportunities and I think more companies hiring for data professionals with these AI systems in the next five years I think we will see in an increase in demand for that with that is a lot of opportunity from people who aren't data focused people who were like I said a nurse who wants to break into here I think it's going to make it easier so if that's you that's fantastic but if you're coming out of something like high school and you have no experience you have no experience in any job whatsoever I think it's going to be tougher for you um so people with domain experience people who have already worked jobs that wasn't data focused but understand the business side of things I think it's going to be even better so that's five years now let's talk about 10 years 15 years I'm gonna kind of lump that just into the future like what does the future of analytics look like I see AI being integrated into a lot of processes and analytics just like I think most of them I think there will always be need for humans to to have their hands in the analytics side of things I think analytics is here to stay I don't see analytics going anywhere I really don't see analytics being automated fully ever um at least not in the foreseeable future I couldn't imagine in the next like 10 or 15 years I just can't I can't see it especially with all the issues that I know are going to arise in the next five years with AI there's gonna be a lot of companies that just straight up ban it another prediction um I think there's gonna be a lot of companies that that ban a lot of AI tools for a lot of different reasons and I don't think um I don't think and you know just to preface this that in the next 10 or 15 years that we'll see an extremely dramatic layoff like what you think about in the news we're thinking Google is just going to be automated um entire departments are going to go away it just it seems in my opinion right now somewhat unfathomable um because I just know how I've been doing so much research on these systems I just feel like I know they have so many downsides they have a lot of upsides there's a lot a lot a lot of opportunity out there but there's a lot of downsides as well I think a lot of companies will see that once they start using them they're gonna be like wow this is amazing but I'm already seeing some of the cracks on the downsides of using AI that's that's kind of what I think um so I'm gonna I'm gonna in just a second go into what I think you should be doing right now as somebody who's breaking into Analytics as somebody who is trying to get an entry level endless Analyst job before I do that I just want to say um I've been in the headspace in the past of like Doomsday prepper this is like the end of analytics robotsy um you know Mass layoffs and maths I've kind of went down that rabbit hole for a little bit all the way to um you know AI can't do what humans do it's just they can't do it they're just robots uh you know training whatever they can't do what we do I've kind of been on both sides at different times and now I'm kind of in the middle where I think that there are some very real concerns for people who are trying to break into data analytics and I think those concerns are extremely valid and I hope I've kind of you know validated those fears because I don't want you to feel like you're the only one thinking about these things I also see a lot of positive things about AI it's going to speed our work up a lot it's going to allow us to do better work faster work and get more done um and I think that's a fantastic thing I in in general I think Pro I am AI I'm Pro AI there are areas where I'm like if this were to go south if AI started doing everything um somehow or it started um you know like in the worst case scenario it starts like you know taking over your systems or you know whatever like Skynet or something right or Terminator you know however this goes I could also see that being very bad but again I I've been talking about I've been talking for like for like an hour I feel overall positive about it I am skeptical I I'm hesitant as well as others right I'm just trying to you know I'm trying to be as honest as I can that's my genuine take on it so what would I do if I was just starting out today now I I have what six almost seven years of experience now working in healthcare I.T Consulting I feel like I have a lot of experience so I feel like for me I have a lot of these tools I have a lot of these skills I have a good um a good reputation I think for someone like me it's not going to be crazy hard a lot of other people who have experience like I do who have experience in analytics and have for several years I think most of you guys are gonna be okay I genuinely do I don't see a huge um Nest layoffs for senior level um even mid-level analysts I think the entry level analyst is going to be the new mid-level so here's what I would say is I would do and this is my personal belief you don't have to do this is what I would be doing if I was starting from scratch I was like I just want to break into analytics at some point in the future I would learn the basics first because even with all of these uh specifically let me go back what's it called Microsoft's copilot 365. chat GPD is going to be integrated into things like Excel very soon something that data analysts work a lot in I would still learn the concepts for using Excel and the reason for that is because when you start using chat gbt for Excel it's going to start popping a lot of these functions a lot of these pivot tables and visualizations and you should know what it's actually doing I am not a huge believer that you should just let it do what it does and blindly believe it um so I would still highly highly highly recommend learning the basics of excel SQL Tableau power bi Python and I think that's really really important I think that Python and that's a lot of what chat gbt is built on and used for and in data analytics and stuff like that python is super popular I would Learn Python probably um you know I would learn that one maybe sooner than I have said in the past where I'm like you don't really need to know python I personally think python is going to be or stick around and they're going to be different programming languages that are built off of that specifically for AI like an AI language that um one of my buddies just sent me called Mojo which is literally built to be read like python it's for AI languages so something like Mojo those are things that you if you know the basics of python you're gonna be able to pick that up quick and learn that so I still highly highly highly recommend learning the basics even up to intermediate and advanced levels if you can the reason for that is after you start after you know those things I do believe that you need to start learning AI you don't need to be an expert in it you need to start dabbling in it at a minimum I think that is going to be extremely important in the future so I would start dabbling with chat GPT start trying to do some data analysis with it start testing it um a you know that will only help you learn right you're going to learn but you're also going to make yourself more job ready for the future five years down the road I think a lot of data analysts are going to be using AI on The Daily so I'm kind of adding that to my like a bucket of things you need to learn learn AI start with chat gbt I think it's like one of the simpler ones then you know this um co-pilot is going to come out not too long so you can start messing around with it in like PowerPoint and Excel and and you know different tools and then plugins with Chachi BT into your into these tools and start messing around with those things again this is May 8th of 2023 in six months Chachi BTS have plugins into Power bi which I'm sure uh they're already gonna do that through Microsoft but it could have plugins into Tableau into looker into um any tool that you're using start learning the basics now start learning chat gbt right after or AI um and then oh yeah so I basically said learn those skills learn how to integrate AI into them and then learn how to solve business problems um I think understanding the business side of things understanding your clients needs your clients wants your stakeholder needs and wants and translating that into um actionable insights you cannot go wrong and that's tough to do when you're first starting out find business use cases you know find projects online I have tons of so something that I would do I have tons of projects online that I've done for free on my YouTube channel right you can take those and try to replicate that using AI try to do what I did in those projects and you can use AI to help you build that do it faster than I did it right that is something I think is a very real use case and I think in the next two to three years if you're doing those things you are going to really set yourself up well again I don't I I maybe I'm just a sucker I'm just really a positive person I just don't see analytics going anywhere I think that we're gonna have more data and more opportunities with the data that's being generated in the future AI is going to help with that I think it's gonna be a huge tool a transformative tool something that you know I couldn't have comprehended even 10 years ago thinking about like like college like it's it's a huge transformative tool it's going to transform a lot of things but it's still in my opinion a tool it's not somebody's going to come in and do everything for you so that's that's what I'm thinking now normally during these um these episodes these long long episodes I do two things at the very end I do a question of the week which um I'm not gonna do I'm not gonna do because I think this is a really serious topic I'm not trying to um I've ran a long time so I'm not gonna do a question of the week this week what I will do is a vegetable of the week um and the vegetable of the week is just saying hey I wash all the way through and it doesn't mean you necessarily agreed with me it just means you're taking this seriously uh so I'm going to reuse a vegetable and because this is so serious in my opinion it's such a serious topic I'm going to reuse one that um has a real close part uh holds a soft spot in my heart which is from one of the very first episodes I ever did um for the Alex analyst show and then the vegetable of the week is going to be jalapeno so if you watched all the way through and you were you could be concerned about AI you could be hopeful about AI you could just be getting into analytics you could just be um you know looking for a senior position in analytics you're watching this because you know either you're you're nervous you're excited or you're not sure what to think and that's what this is all about and so if you stayed all the way to the end and put jalapenos in the comments section below I will know that you were taking this very seriously you care about your future if you don't put in a jalapeno in there I'm gonna assume you don't care but seriously um heavy topic I I genuinely I put weights not way too much thought I put a lot of thought um just because I care so much about it this topic means so much to me the you guys mean so much to me I wanted to make sure I was bringing you good information I hope I brought you good thoughts that maybe you haven't thought about before um good ideas that you haven't thought about before and I hope um because I know there's a lot of people out there that are really worried I hope that I put some people at ease uh in my heart I am at ease I am not crazy worried um just because I feel like I have a pretty good understanding for how companies think and work and operate uh you know I I feel like I have a pretty good Instinct on this um just on on how they're going to respond AI how it's actually going to go with implementing these AI systems so I feel like I I hope for the most part um AI I see is a very big tool and I'm hoping I put some people at ease it's a very serious topic it's people's livelihoods it's people's futures it's crazy important I can't under I can't I can't say this enough you know it just this technology has the ability to transform lives for the better for the worse um and for the majority I think it's going to transform it for the better I'm not I'm not gonna I don't know if I refuse to believe it or refuse to think about I'm not going to succumb to um kind of the Doomsday prepper end of the world end of data Professionals in general and there are people out there like that I just think they maybe haven't been in the industry long enough for understand it enough or they're just crazy negative people I don't know it's hard to say um you know I kept saying the date on here and I kept saying that because I want to come back to this in one year like I'm making a a note I already have the note on my calendar for when this launches which should be next Tuesday Missy why is my thing not here what the heck here we go next Tuesday is the 16th so on on May 16th of 2024 I'm going to come back and see how accurate it was um a lot of things are going to change a lot of things are going to change I just I I have a strong hunch and all of my research has pointed to that it's gonna mostly be for the better that's what everything is telling me I hope I'm right I really hope I'm right if I'm wrong and in five years you know analytics is completely gone you guys can be mad at me and I want you to be mad at me but with all the information I have now I'm giving you the best I'm giving you the best I got I really hope I really hope if I'm wrong you guys can forgive me I hope if I'm right you guys can um celebrate with me but this is a again now I'm just rambling you guys can go you already typed jalapeno down below I'm just gonna hang out for a little bit this is a long episode anyways nobody cares nobody cares if it goes an extra five minutes it's just a really I don't know it's really been weighing on me too it's really been weighing on me it's really been weighing on me now if you're staying if you're sticking around to the end I'm gonna catch you in on some Secrets um and some other things that I've been thinking about you know I'm starting this company or starting this this platforming website called analyst Builder it's not released yet uh it'll be ready in like a month or two I've been working out for over a year and it's for data analysts to learn data analysis to practice data analysis and I'm going to grow the website to be something incredible I think it's going to be one of the best data analyst websites that is out there like legitimately it's already incredible um as is and it's simple it hasn't even gotten like to the stuff that I want to get on there and four or five months ago when I had that like moment of like oh my gosh it's over I was like AI won there's no use in me building this anymore I should stop tell the developers to stop building I legitimately had that thought and the more I looked into the more I'm like the more I'm like this needs to happen this is going to be more important this is going to be this will be my platform to help ushering kind of the new data analyst of the future where I'm going to start teaching I I mean I'm gonna I'm diving deep right now into Ai and so you know one of my goals is to integrate AI into the platform do courses on AI teach people how to use AI as well as on YouTube for free of course because I I you know this website of course will be some things will be paid for but you know these are the things that people are going to need to learn and someone's got to teach them and universities are not going to do it anymore all right random rant but with chat gbt AI llms all these things the need for higher education is going to go down substantially in certain areas I just I know it in 15 years I think it'll be like you went to college that's pretty cool nobody does college none of my friends went to college it's going to be like that it's that it's that transformative and so you know I I don't think waiting for education to catch up is the way to go I think platforms like mine are gonna be I want to say the future but it's good you know for people who want to break into analytics my goal is to be on the front lines and creating content on YouTube and an analyst Builder to um kind of keep people up with technology and what's out there and what's being done um and that's that's you know that's where my heart is my heart is still in YouTube it is still very much in my audience and my community so I feel like I owe it to them you guys have given me so much I feel like I legitimately like I I feel like I owe it to you guys to keep going um and that really pushed me through to be like okay if that's what I'm thinking I need to get out of this funk I need to really dive into this and see like what if this is all true like you'll see claims on like Twitter and Linkedin like AI is rooting data science it's ruining it analytics like there's no jobs don't do it the more I looked in I was like that's just not what I found and so I'm really happy I kind of got out of that funk I'm still here for you guys I am still going to be creating content now I'm just looking at myself I'm still going to be creating content I'm still going to be creating uh courses I plan on staying as up to date on this technology as I can so that I can then teach you guys um and I want you guys my audience my community I want you guys to be the first ones learning these things that you can then go out there and get these jobs because they're going to be jobs there's it's not going away I really I'm just so certain about it with that being said I've talked for long enough I am now getting headache and I also have blood drawn this morning for life insurance policy um I I had some blood drawn this morning it's now a little lightheaded so I've been sipping on water so with that being said um I hope I hope that I brought some positivity or positive thoughts on it around um just a heavy topic it's a really heavy topic and I can't I could try to make it fun but then I just I'd feel disingenuine because this is a very heavy Topic in my opinion so um yeah that's how I'm gonna end it it's a heavy topic um but I I'm overall positive I keep saying it but you know I just keep thinking about it I'm overall positive thank you guys for joining I do appreciate it I really do if you're out there listening still I mean you guys are the real heroes you guys are the real heroes um so with that being said have a good week I'll see you on March May 16th when this launches I'll see you then all right well take it easy uh have a good one enjoy uh your day give your significant other family member friend child a hug not for me that'd be weird um just from you if you really want it to come from me you could don't do that don't do that all right now for real I'm out here now have a good one goodbye and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Alex The Analyst

Views: 37,834

Keywords: Data Analyst, Data Analyst job, Data Analyst Career, Data Analytics, Alex The Analyst, AI Analytics, Analytics in AI

Id: FpgkpjSyBOw

Length: 72min 32sec (4352 seconds)

Published: Mon May 15 2023