This is not the end of the data analyst, because it was never a start

Once I worked in an office with two enormous desks. The IT people on the right. The marketing people on the left. Two worlds separated by a corridor.

Do you know where they put me?

At a single desk, right in the middle. No department. No tribe. No man’s land.

That was years ago. And yet, it’s the image that best describes what it means to be a data analyst.

There’s a lot of talk now about the role disappearing. AI will make it obsolete, they say. With the same certainty they once said the web analyst would die with the rise of apps, or that the digital analyst was just a transitional role. Always in transition. Always about to go extinct. Always here.

But there’s something nobody mentions in that debate: there was never a university for data analysts.

It doesn’t exist. It never did. No official degree, no professional body. The same goes for web analysts, digital analysts, and analytics engineers. We all came from somewhere else. We all learned differently.

A role that never had a formal beginning cannot have a formal end.

I studied Law. I wore the gown three times and represented real clients in court. Almost everything I know about technology I learned by reading online, buying books, and taking courses — some paid, most free.

At my first IT company I did both: I advised on data protection — what today would be GDPR — and managed systems. My colleagues ended up calling me Abomático. Lawyer (Abogado ) plus IT guy (Informático). You have to admit it has a ring to it.

Then I moved into database administration for CRMs, setting up RAID 5 on physical servers back when the cloud didn’t exist yet. Then I took a web analytics course and became a web analyst. Then Web 2.0 arrived, apps arrived, and the word “web” felt too small — so I became a digital analyst, even though the work was essentially the same. Then came CRMs, marketing data sources, purchase data. I was still an analyst.

Now my title reads Analytics Engineer. Somewhere between analyst and data engineer. No university for that either. We’ll see how long the name lasts.

The strangest thing about these ten-plus years is that, no matter how much people said the role was established, we were always “cross-functional.” That comfortable euphemism for not quite fitting in anywhere.

Too technical for Marketing. Not technical enough for BI.

For a long time I felt that as a weakness. Like the kid who always gets picked last for the football team. That awkward moment when everyone else already has a side but you.

Now I see it differently.

We are the ones who put the tags. The ones who cannot be tagged.

And yes, now we need to talk about AI — because it would be dishonest to dodge it.

Artificial intelligence is going to transform this role. It already is. Tasks that used to take days now take hours. Reports that once required five people can now be drafted by one person with the right tools. I won’t pretend that has no consequences.

But something strikes me as curious: we have been adapting for decades. Web analyst, digital analyst, data analyst, analytics engineer. The market changed the name and we changed with it — no instruction manual, no degree to prepare us for it.

Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It only transforms.

What I don’t know — and I’d rather be honest about it — is exactly what this role will transform into this time. I don’t have that answer. Nobody does, even if many pretend they do.

What I do know is that we’ve done this before. Without a university. Without a roadmap. With a single desk between two worlds that never quite accepted us.

And we’re still here.

How are you experiencing this? Do you feel AI threatens what you do, or that it simply changes how you do it?