Today, artificial intelligence is acting as the backbone of new technologies coming up. Generative AI, especially, has revolutionized many tasks that humans perform currently. For example, ChatGPT is a text-based generative AI that can generate any kind of text, be it codes or essays. And this capability has improved several business operations such as customer service, copywriting, and assisting software developers with the necessary codes.
Generative AI has also had a huge impact on the data science industry as well. They have managed to perform several tasks that are done by data analysts. ChatGPT can write code for Python, SQL, R, and other programming languages. So, can we conclude that in the near future, it will also replace the job of Data Analysts? And what is its major impact on the data analysis industry? Let’s check it out in detail in this article.
The present scenario of data analysts and ChatGPT
If we look at the current scenario, the integration of ChatGPT has not been fully done in data analysis jobs, although they are used for various tasks.
Data Analysts play an important role in performing critical tasks in any data science project. Their job starts right from the beginning, i.e. data collection. Then they clean the data, remove any errors or inconsistencies in the data, and prepare it for further processing. They utilize machine learning techniques to analyze the data. They use their statistical and mathematical skills to do data analysis and derive meaningful insights.
Meanwhile, ChatGPT developed by Open AI is one of the most popular Generative AI tools that has been trained on massive amounts of data. This enables them to perform several text-generating jobs efficiently in no time. And performing data analysis jobs is not an exclusion. In the next section, we will see how they are assisting in the data analysis industry.
What is Generative AI capable of in terms of data analysis?
ChatGPT recently launched its plugin called code interceptor. So, data science professionals having access to the Alpha version of it can just upload their data set and command it to perform the job they want to get done. ChatGPT, integrated with Python, can easily do regression and descriptive analysis, and even create easy-to-understand data visualization. Here are some of the tasks that can be done by using ChatGPT in the data science industry:
- Generative AI can automate many of the repetitive tasks that data analysts currently perform, such as data cleaning, data preparation, and data visualization.
- They can generate insights that would be possibly difficult for humans to do
- They can also help in personalizing insights according to the need which will make it easier to communicate with different types of professionals.
- Helping data analysts perform jobs accurately and faster.
In the coming times, when the LLMs will be trained on more refined data, they will be able to perform these data analysis tasks more accurately without minimum to no chance of errors.
Limitations of Generative AI
Hence, we can say that they are poised to replace data analysts in the future, right? Well, no. As per our research, not anytime soon. This is because there are several limitations to using Generative AI on a large scale in the data science industry. Below mentioned are some of them:
- Generative AI requires data to be uploaded on their server to perform herculean tasks. As a company, nobody would like to use the company’s important data outside the company.
- Though there are several platforms that allow developing your own LLMs, it is not worth investing so much time and money which doesn’t guarantee results.
- The plugin allows uploading 100MB of data. This is good only for school students to learn data analysis. Companies need to analyze terabytes of data which is not possible with code interceptors.
- Moreover, there are some complex questions that need to be answered, such as why the main supplier is moving out of business. This requires exceptional business knowledge and indirect data analysis which could be well performed only by applying the human mind and not machines.
Conclusion
ChatGPT is undoubtedly a very popular and highly efficient Generative AI tool that holds incredible value in generating texts, codes, and doing text processing jobs. They can definitely help you write code for particular processes you want in your data analysis task. They can also automate repetitive codes that are required during the cleaning, preparation, and processing of data. But still, because of several limitations that we discussed, they cannot replace humans in their data analyst jobs. Since ChatGPT can assist them without compromising the data of the company, data analysts can perform their job faster and more accurately. Thus, they can also focus on doing more productive work pertaining to their job.
