Data people needed business partners to do good work. At least that's what I used to think. AI's made a mess of that, hasn't it.
Daft Punk said it best - Work it harder, make it better, do it faster, makes us stronger. Just didn't realize at the time they were singing about data & analytics.
The path to self-service data was a long but straightforward one: adopt the modern data stack, educate all living souls on how to write SQL, learn Looker, prompt AI. Salvation lay in frictionless access to data for our end users.
Two gotchas nobody puts in the self-service righteousness deck:
One. Even with perfect data, the decision is only as good as the decision-maker. You can ungate a PM all you want; if they want the number to say "ship it," the number will say "ship it."
Two. When good decisions do get made, the business absorbs the credit. The data team becomes plumbing. Invisible when working, beaten with a monkey wrench when it leaks. The best we could hope for was silence.
Then AI showed up and said, "hold my beer."
Note to self: turn Clode into my always-on, always-hyped hypeman. Because baby, data's ABC, not ABB.
(I'm still gonna keep building tho)
The path continues to evolve. You now have the semantic layer squad duking it out with the prompt-to-SQL gang, trying to win the hearts & dollars of those pesky decision makers trying to run a business. Will they use a highly observable, agent-orchestrated, insight-vomiting war machine to bring that CAC down, 50 Cent!
At least their slides will look nicer. Have you seen Claude Design, hot dang!
So do data people still need business people to do good work (assuming "work" continues to exist)? I don't think that matters anymore.
It's always been about judgment. AI has just laid it bare.