Future Data Cringe

Gone are the days of fighting with your dashboard containers. Analysts of the future will become first-class partners uncovering deep insights while driving outsized impact, at a speed we never thought possible.

It was like owning a library with millions of books that nobody had ever read.

Until recently, we couldn’t imagine working as BI developers without Looker or Tableau. But our role is already shifting beyond building dashboards, toward using our business understanding to align data, ensure consistency, and build models that both humans and AI can trust.

We’ll cringe at how we treated AI-generated output as free or productive simply because it was instant to produce. Every confidently wrong analysis still had to be read, understood, and cleaned up by a human. Future us will know all too well that one lazy prompt might save 30 minutes but ultimately create hours of work for everyone downstream.

So much data work still involves translating natural business questions into schemas, joins, and hand-maintained metric definitions. In 20 years, it may seem absurd that people had to understand the data model, instead of the data model understanding them: their intent, context, terminology, and required level of trust.

A dashboard tells you what happened. An intelligent operating system will increasingly tell you: what happened → why → what will happen → what should we do → what happens if we do it → execute the decision → learn from it.

Future us will surely cringe at how hard we tried to use AI on data, simply because we were so determined to make AI make us more efficient. I personally can’t wait to move past that phase and reach a point where AI-assisted data work actually results in better work, where data agents have the context they need to produce results we can trust, and we humans can focus our expertise where it matters most.

Said proudly, in a steering committee, as if that was the achievement. No job description, no hours in anyone’s calendar, just a name in a slide next to a domain. I think in twenty years we’ll look back at that the way we now look at putting someone’s name on a fire safety poster and calling the building safe.