Is Data Science Dead?

The field has found it's first dead end and must evolve to create real value for businesses. There is no Data Scientist who can manage it all. The role is dead and the team is born.

Is Data Science dying or dead? Yes. Our field is moving away from descriptive modeling which has dominated the last 5 years. These models hit production and return little value. They are unreliable. Within 1-2 years, they end up costing more to maintain than they did to build. All the while, their performance continues to degrade.

Data Engineering is an increasingly automated process. Microsoft’s (and other vendors’) product roadmap for Power BI and Azure Machine Learning services has already automated much of the pipeline creation and data serving. Low code/no code solutions are well suited for this workflow with little technical expertise involved. Generic model development is increasingly automated and being handled by non-Data Scientists.

Where does the field go?