How AI Is Changing the Role of Data Analytics

Data analytics used to spend much of its time answering a familiar question: What happened? Analysts gathered data, built reports, spotted trends and helped organizations make sense of the past. Artificial intelligence (AI) has made that work faster, but it has also changed what organizations expect from it. This interesting and important topic came to us from HPC Wire in their article, “AI Is Forcing Analytics Teams Into a New Role.”

AI tools can sift through large datasets, flag unusual patterns and forecast outcomes instead of waiting for a custom report. That gives analysts more time to tackle the harder questions: Why is this happening? What might happen next? And what should we do about it?

The shift sounds exciting, and it is. But a faster answer is not automatically a better one. AI can identify a correlation without understanding the circumstances behind it. It can build a convincing forecast from incomplete data. It can even make a questionable finding look polished enough to pass along without a second thought.

That makes human judgment more valuable, not less. Analysts need to understand where the data came from and explain what the findings mean for the people making decisions. They also need to know when the data cannot support a confident answer.

AI has changed data analytics from a discipline focused largely on producing reports to one that can help guide decisions in real time. The best analysts will use that speed to ask better questions, test the answers and make sure the story the data tells is one the evidence can actually support.

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Melody K. Smith

Data Harmony is an award-winning semantic suite that leverages explainable AI.

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