Analytics in the Age of AI: Why Fundamentals Still Matter
Simo Ahava, with Gunnar Griese, Steen Rasmussen & Jomar Reyes
When AI can generate code, analysis and answers almost instantly, what happens to expertise? Simo Ahava joins the hosts to look past the question of whether AI replaces analysts, and at what practitioners actually need to understand to use it responsibly. The productivity gains are real — but working a problem through by hand is what builds the mental models that let you recognise a confident answer that happens to be wrong.
The conversation keeps returning to fundamentals that have not moved: reliable measurement still rests on data quality, correct implementation and knowing what the organisation is trying to achieve. Modelling and synthetic data cannot compensate indefinitely for weak real-world data. It widens into a critique of how organisations use analytics at all — what happens when data becomes negotiable, and why analytics is worth more integrated into decisions than run as an answer-producing department.
AI can make analytics faster, but speed alone does not create expertise.
Audio version coming to Spotify