I need to say something that makes some data analysts uncomfortable: the job is changing. Not disappearing — changing. And the analysts who understand the change will thrive. The ones who don’t will spend the next five years fighting it.
In January 2024, Hugging Face published a benchmark that most people in the data world missed. They compared open-source LLMs against GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 on agent tasks — using a dataset that requires web search and calculator use, the fundamentals of any analytics agent.
In February 2024, the Berkeley AI Research Lab published a paper that quietly explained everything. Not “how to build AI” — but why the move from single LLM calls to multi-component systems is inevitable. And once you read it, you see analytics differently.
In August 2025, Meta published an engineering blog post that changed how I think about analytics agents. It’s called “Creating AI Agent Solutions for Warehouse Data Access and Security,” and it describes a multi-agent system they built for their internal data warehouse.