20 years ago, if you wanted to build a website, you pretty much had to hire a programmer to hand-code it for you using HTML and JavaScript.
Yet, by 2017, no-code website-building tools had become so mainstream that one such tool was, literally, being advertised by two of the world's biggest action stars during the world's most-watched annual sporting event.
Drag-and-drop website builders, such as Wix, have democratised website development, by making it accessible to non-programmers. But in the process, have also commoditised the roles of website developers - forcing them to choose between moving further up the value chain or "competing against robots" (spoilers: the robots always win).
Here's the thing...
Right now, most data science models are built by data scientists who fit their models by writing code in Python or R.
Yet, the increasing availability of no-code and low-code AI and data science tools, coupled with the high demand for data-driven insights, mean it's only a matter of time before machine learning model building goes the way of website development.
These tools are democratising machine learning. And this will inevitably lead to the commoditisation of the roles of today's data science model builders.
But
just because those roles are commoditised, it does not necessarily follow that the people who currently have those roles need become commodities themselves.
The best website developers of 20 years ago didn't accept life as commodity workers. Instead, they moved further up the value chain and
demonstrated the value they could add - as the developers of more complex software products, experts in website deployment, and the like.
And the same will be true of the best data science model builders of today. They will become the future data science strategists and developers of more complex AI
tools. They will find ways to move further up the value chain.
But you don't need to wait for the inevitable Super Bowl commercial to signal it's time to make that move.
Demonstrating your value as a data scientist will never be the wrong move when it comes to building your career.
To paraphrase an old saying: the best time to start de-commoditising yourself is on day one of your career, the next
best time to start is today.
Talk again soon,
Dr Genevieve Hayes.
p.s. I recently spoke to Geo George about the democratisation of AI and data science on Value Driven Data Science. You can listen to the entire conversation HERE.
