Every week I see another headline about AI replacing analysts. As someone who uses AI tools daily—and has watched my own productivity multiply because of them—here is my honest assessment.
What AI Does Well Today
1. Data Summarization
AI excels at turning large datasets into readable summaries. Give it a data export and it can identify trends, outliers, and patterns faster than manual review. I have found this particularly useful for initial exploration.
2. Code Generation
Writing SQL queries, Python scripts, and visualization code is dramatically faster with AI assistance. In my experience, I am seeing 30-40% productivity gains on routine coding tasks—sometimes more.
3. Documentation
Explaining methodologies, writing reports, and creating presentations—AI handles these well with good prompting.
Where AI Still Struggles
1. Causal Inference
AI can find correlations all day. But understanding why metrics moved and what would happen under different scenarios? That still requires human judgment. I have seen AI confidently propose explanations that completely miss the actual cause.
2. Business Context
AI does not know that your CEO just announced a strategic pivot, or that the marketing team has a strained relationship with sales. Context matters enormously, and it is hard to prompt your way around this limitation.
3. Novel Problems
When facing a truly new analytical challenge—one not well-represented in training data—AI guidance becomes unreliable. This is where experience really counts.
4. Stakeholder Management
Convincing a skeptical VP to change their strategy based on data? That is a human skill. Probably always will be.
The Real Future
AI will not replace analysts. But analysts who use AI will replace those who do not.
The winning combination:
- AI for: Speed, scale, routine tasks, first drafts
- Humans for: Judgment, strategy, relationships, novel problems
The job title might stay the same, but the actual work is shifting toward higher-leverage activities: asking better questions, designing better analyses, and driving organizational change.
My Advice
- Learn AI tools deeply—not just prompting, but understanding capabilities and limitations
- Double down on judgment—the parts of analysis that require experience and intuition
- Build relationships—your value increasingly comes from influence, not just analysis
- Stay curious—the landscape is changing fast
The analysts who thrive will be those who see AI as a powerful collaborator, not a threat. I am betting my career on this.