What Do Data Scientists Actually Do? And How Does AI Fit In?

Data science isn’t glamorous - but it is essential. Almost all of the job is cleaning and preparing data! Finding missing values, fixing inconsistencies, getting it into a usable format.

What’s left are the fun bits - exploring data to find insights, choosing and testing machine learning models, and communicating findings to business stakeholders. It’s about solving business problems with data - not about building complex AI.

Data scientists pull data from databases, clean it, and run analyses to understand customer behavior, and then once they’re done, they get to present findings to the marketing team in a way they can actually use.

The Core Skills and Daily Tasks

Data scientists need programming skills (usually Python and R) and business communication skills. Their day-to-day involves building models to predict customer churn, sales forecasts, or fraud detection - essential components to a successful business.

When you want teams making data-driven decisions, it’s the data scientists who create the reports and dashboards that make it happen! They may create a model to help prioritize sales leads, or build a dashboard to visualize marketing campaign successes - business needs are flexible, so data scientists have to be, too.