Since today’s AI capabilities depend on massive amounts of data, data professionals are redefining their responsibilities inside the organization.
According to a November 2023 Salesforce study, 77% of business leaders are already concerned they are missing out on the benefits of the AI revolution we are currently engulfed in since technology has advanced rapidly.
Given AI’s nearly infinite applications, where should an organization direct its attention first? An organization’s most important asset, its data, and the roles most directly involved in managing, utilizing, and consuming it. After all, the quality of the enormous amounts of data that are used to train today’s acclaimed generative AI models depends on those data sets. It is imperative to have capable stewards of that data estate.
AI will replace very few, if any, jobs involving data. Rather, AI-driven software will augment their talents — and motivate aspirational data workers to promptly acquire any new AI-related competencies that may be required. Here is a brief summary of how AI will affect data roles throughout the company.
Data Officers In Charge (CDOs)
According to the Harvard Business Review, CDOs hold their roles for an average of just 2.5 years, making it one of the hardest C-level jobs in IT. AI has the ability to revolutionize CDO by creating new avenues for bringing value to the company.
The office of the CDO was formerly thought of as a cost center that maintained data security, integrity, and governance. AI improves the CDO’s reputation in significant ways. In order to enhance data quality, database performance, and data analytics, it first adds a great deal of automation, which produces better results overall. Second, massive repositories of high-quality data are necessary for AI applications like chatbots, price optimizers, and predictive analytics, many of which are already generating new revenue.
However, AI also means that CDOs have a significant additional responsibility: making ensuring that the training data for AI produces results that are not skewed. The classic example is when minority borrowers, job applicants, business partners, and so forth are unintentionally associated with risk. AI software developers also have an obligation to avoid prejudice, which is why continuous collaborative testing is necessary.
Through efficient planning and design, data architects bring the CDO’s vision, policies, and initiatives to life. Data modeling is the first step in this process, which entails gathering, evaluating, and creating the logical and physical models needed to support the data requirements. Although AI-powered data modeling is still in its infancy, as the technology advances, architects will be able to create increasingly complex and precise models.
In order to provide applications throughout an organization with the best possible data location, storage performance, and security, data architects can employ AI-enabled technologies to spot patterns in data utilization. Architects can use this type of analysis to estimate capacity planning, which helps them decide which data to keep on which platforms in the cloud or on-site both now and in the future.
Integrators and data engineers
The traditional challenge of combining and reconciling data from various repositories for a variety of business applications is handled by data integration specialists, whereas data engineers typically manage data at the system level rather than the organizational level, with an emphasis on infrastructure. AI is already helping these two roles that overlap.
Metadata management, or the organization of all relevant information that characterizes data that is helpful to the firm, independent of platform or origin, is the main concern in this field. There are now AI solutions available that can assist in regularizing and surfacing metadata schema for data integration and mapping. Additionally, some automate the process of building data pipelines, which are essential to data integration. More recent AI solutions have the ability to continuously check the quality of data as it passes through pipelines, instantly identifying discrepancies.
DBAs, Or Database Administrators
Various aspects of managing an enterprise database include performance tweaking, extensive SQL querying, availability and security assurance, and more. As data stores grow and new database software versions are released, DBAs usually have to minimize disturbance while balancing the needs of various user groups. Once more, AI may free up time for DBAs to spend capturing and meeting stakeholder demands rather than spending it on mundane activities.
The big winner, though, is optimization. DBAs can identify bottlenecks and predict impending infrastructure constraints by using AI-powered tools to assess performance characteristics. These technologies can also be used to enhance capacity without the need for human interaction. AI tools that access the database itself can make recommendations for indexing adjustments and query modifications that yield faster, better results.
Scientists Of Data
The data scientist, a profession requiring extensive abilities in programming, machine learning (ML), mathematics, and data analysis tools, may gain most from AI of all. For instance, selecting the best machine learning algorithm for a given task is made much easier by automated machine learning (AutoML). Additionally, data scientists using R or Python code can profit from the higher productivity provided by AI coding helpers, just like with any programming.
With the use of massive amounts of data, data scientists may uncover long-term company patterns, dangers, and opportunities. This process is made possible by the recent release of analytics software that incorporates artificial intelligence (AI). However, there is a little-known but unsavory aspect to the work: data scientists spend the majority of their time gathering, preparing, and cleansing data. While AI-powered solutions are coming to help fulfill the six aspects of data quality (accuracy, completeness, consistency, uniqueness, timeliness, and validity), AI-powered data cataloging speeds up sourcing. The foundational effort enhances the usefulness of data analytics throughout the company.
Analysts Of Data
While they usually concentrate on domain-specific decision support rather than broad insights, data analysts, like data scientists, are profiting from new AI capabilities incorporated into the newest analytics tools. Predictive analytics has been fueled by AI for years, but new, iterative ML capabilities are enhancing pattern (and anomaly) identification to produce forecasts that are significantly more accurate. AI is also capable of autonomously creating dashboards and presenting the optimal visualization for the work at hand.
The result of all this automation is to increase access to data analytics. People who are not proficient in query language can now conduct their own analysis thanks to natural language interfaces, and artificial intelligence’s guidance system keeps the ignorant from making mistakes. AI is radically extending analytics’ potential and providing a wider range of business analysts with more potent self-service tools, so altering analytics forever at an astonishing rate.
Programmers
Although software developers work with millions of lines of code, they are not really data experts given the amount of data they handle. Simultaneously, numerous developers are incorporating machine learning capabilities into programs that handle various types of business data. The productivity of developers is being affected by AI-based coding assistance in double digits in both scenarios.
Beyond just finishing off tedious lines of code, coding assistants do much more. Developers no longer have to courageously search through enormous open source code repositories using natural language queries, in addition to their own proprietary code base. They can be served well-formed and in compliance with the coding guidelines set forth by the developer’s company by coding assistants. Sometimes, coding assistants can also suggest which machine learning methods are best for a given application task.
AI’s Takeover Over Business
It’s reasonable to argue that no new technology has affected society as rapidly as artificial intelligence. Professionals in marketing, product development, service operations, risk analysis, and other fields are riding the adoption of AI like a hockey stick, even if data wranglers and developers are experiencing the biggest effects. Across the whole organization, improvements in data quality and analysis are already noticeable. The most astounding thing is probably that we’ve only just begun.