Shaun McGirr is a data & AI leader with 20 years of varied experience across official statistics, academia, consulting, automotive, and software. His mission in life is to help others do something useful with their precious data. AI has turned up the heat on everyone trying to create value from data, but many data professionals remain extremely sceptical about its impact on their own work. This is a wasted opportunity because the AI skills organisations are most lacking are (almost) the same skills data professionals uniquely bundle together. When not working, Shaun answers increasingly difficult questions from his two children and reminisces about an earlier life as a semi-professional musician.
Session Overview
Is AI the End of BI as We Knew It?
For decades, prediction was a promise tacked on the end of data maturity models, under different names: advanced analytics, data science, machine learning. This utopia of “value beyond reporting” launched countless data initiatives, and the slow grind up the maturity curve held a certain comfort for many data professionals, myself included. Then (Gen)AI crashed in to corporate consciousness in 2023 and has not stopped rocking the boat and exasperating data teams.
Why are we building chatbots, when we can’t even get the basics right? Haven’t they seen our maturity model? Are we losing control of the data agenda? Was our struggle for nothing? Garbage in, garbage out. But it is increasingly untenable to keep telling stakeholders to wait for the next data (re)platforming to finish before they cause chaos — even if we are right on average. Instead, we must refocus and realign, using the unique skillset only data professionals hold to better guide our organisations on what should have been the mission all along.
In this talk I update my own expired maturity models for an age when the most value-generating data do not hide in tables, and the means of prediction have become accessible to all. Our daily habits must change, not to waste this AI moment.
Three Tangible Learnings
Why BI-then-AI maturity models have held us back for decades.
How (Gen)AI is shifting power from data teams to business users and software developers.
What’s at stake if data teams do not reframe their unique expertise.
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Shaun McGirr is a data & AI leader with 20 years of varied experience across official statistics, academia, consulting, automotive, and software. His mission in life is to help others do something useful with their precious data. AI has turned up the heat on everyone trying to create value from data, but many data professionals remain extremely sceptical about its impact on their own work. This is a wasted opportunity because the AI skills organisations are most lacking are (almost) the same skills data professionals uniquely bundle together. When not working, Shaun answers increasingly difficult questions from his two children and reminisces about an earlier life as a semi-professional musician.
