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Christophe De Greift shares an article that contradicts popular culture and redefines the image of the data scientist. 

The ‘sexiest profession of the 21st century,’ named in 2012 by the Harvard Business Review to define the Data Scientist, has gone through various emotional states lately, depending on its field of action. Those who support understanding and predicting the health situation are heroes, whose analyzes define life and death questions such as where to send new artificial respirators. On the other hand, those responsible for predictive models for product demand, credit risk or customer churn, for example, may feel frustrated when seeing them lose precision and relevance with the sudden changes in demand and supply caused by the quarantine. How will the Data Scientists of Peruvian airlines feel about the challenge of forecasting passenger demand in the coming weeks, the next few months?

Many corporate decisions that until February this year were made based on predictive artificial intelligence models are now made subjectively by people, as was done before the ‘big data’ era.

Is returning to pure intuition the solution? Moment … We can talk about a new reality, but humans are still irrational, biased and even blind, that is, intrinsically limited to make decisions. Quantitative models, with all their limitations, can be great companions for making good decisions, if we know how to use them.

Points covered in this article include:

• The data scientist
• Artificial intelligence
• The decision scientist

Read the full article, The Sexiest Profession Post COVID, on Christophe’s website.