How AI Is Redefining Data Careers
Professionally working alongside AI is the future and, rather than being supplanted, the data professionals of tomorrow will be AI-augmented – not automated away!
We are in the midst of an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution that is transforming enterprise data strategies across multiple roles. As AI models require vast training datasets for accuracy, companies now realise quality data is imperative to seize competitive advantage. Demand for CDOs is distributed globally, with adoption rates of 63.8% in North America, 60.9% in Europe, over 50% in Latin America and close to 50% in China.
Per a research report from the IBM Institute of Business Value leading CDOs spend less on data strategy and management than their peers, yet achieve equal or greater annual revenue growth. In their actions and through their choices, they’re leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for other CDOs to follow and learn from. It’s a trail worth following. This leading group of CDOs – the Value Creators – are 50% more likely to be responsible for increasing data ROI than other CDOs and are outperforming them by 40% in innovation
Chief Data Officers: Architects of Enterprise AI
The chief data officer (CDO) oversees organisation-wide data policies and governance. With average CDO tenures only 2.5 years, it’s considered one of the toughest executive positions. However, AI presents fresh opportunities for CDOs to demonstrate tangible value.By automating data management tasks like cleaning and cataloguing, AI allows CDOs to focus more strategic efforts on data quality, analytics and application effectiveness. As AI biases can creep in via problematic training data, CDOs also ensure continuous testing for fairness across AI systems. Our CDO curriculum provides the vital skills to balance innovation with ethics at the highest data echelons.
Data Architects: Planning for AI’s Data Appetite
Data architects translate CDO visions into logical and physical data models capable of serving user needs now and in the future. Leveraging AI-powered analytics, architects can detect usage trends, perform predictive capacity planning, assign optimal data storage locations and more. As enterprise AI models demand more data, our architect program teaches designing flexible databases and pipelines.
Integrating Disparate Data for ML Models
Data engineers build and optimise data infrastructure whereas data integration specialists reconcile information from multiple sources to power business applications. AI currently assists both roles by discovering metadata to map points between datasets. Our program’s key focus areas include structuring reliable, high-quality data pipelines to continually feed ever-larger machine learning models.
Database Administrators Harness AI Optimisation
Database administrators (DBAs) ensure ongoing database availability, security, integrity and peak performance. AI enables DBAs to spend less time on repetitive tasks by analysing usage trends and autonomously tuning configurations. DBA coursework explores leveraging predictive AI for proactive capacity scaling and reduced disruption as data stores grow.
Data Scientists Apply Advanced Analytics
Although data scientists uncover impactful enterprise insights through statistical analysis and machine learning (ML), most of their work involves the onerous grunt work of acquiring and preparing data. Our data science concentration specifically delves into data labelling, cleaning, and preprocessing automation techniques to accelerate towards higher-value modelling tasks.
Data Analysts Capitalise on AI Prediction
Data analysts create reports and visualisations that support business decision-making across domains. New AI augmentation provides more accurate predictive modelling and intelligent dashboard assemblage. Natural language search also lets novice analysts query data independently. Our analyst program explores these innovations in self-service analytics democratisation.
Developers Utilise AI Coding Assistants
By integrating machine learning capabilities and processing copious data volumes, software developers deal extensively with data science concepts. AI coding assistants analyse millions of open-source code samples to provide context-aware recommendations–boosting developer productivity. Students leverage these co-piloting assistants while honing programming abilities.
Will AI Automate Data Professional Roles?
There is a real possibility that AI could automate some tasks currently performed by data professionals, but full automation of these roles remains unlikely for the foreseeable future.
For highly complex and strategic roles like Chief Data Officers and Data Architects, automation is very limited currently. AI assistants may provide insights and recommendations, but critical thinking, leadership, communication and ethics considerations around data strategies mean humans will continue leading these areas.
For more technical roles like Data Engineers, DBAs, Data Scientists and Analysts, AI will likely automate repetitive, mundane sub-tasks. This includes things like initial data sourcing, basic cleaning/labelling, query performance tuning etc. However, these roles deal with nuanced exceptions, stakeholder needs and sophisticated analytics that require human contextual judgment. Models don’t always work out-of-the-box.
The biggest disruption may come at more junior levels, as smart data preparation tools and no-code AI open data manipulation and basic insights to non-specialists. But scaling, securing and continually optimising data systems at enterprise scope needs experienced professionals. AI also creates new demand around MLOps, bias detection, synthetic data generation etc.
In software development, coding assistants significantly boost individual programmer productivity but still cannot replace developers entirely. There are too many edge cases and requirements shifts. Engineering leadership and customer negotiations also remain firmly human responsibilities.
While AI will reshape many data tasks, but outright replacement of these specialised roles could take decades, if at all. We believe professionally working alongside AI is the future, rather than being supplanted. The data professionals of tomorrow will be AI-augmented, not automated away.