Pre-AI, when I was transitioning into data analytics, a friend warned me: "You're going to spend most of your time cleaning data." And that was true for a while.

AI changed that. Data cleaning that used to take hours now takes minutes, but how I spend time working with data has changed.

Now I'm checking if the cleaning was done with the right context. Did AI understand what "active patient" means in this specific workflow? Did it handle the edge cases the way this team actually operates?

I saved time in a way, but the bottleneck has moved.

Most of my time is spent upstream now. In the questions before the query, in the definitions before the build, and in the decisions that have to happen before anyone touches a tool.

AI relocated our time. As a practitioner, start spending it upstream.