The first break-out lounge session in the Inclusive Futures Lounge was a panel about collaboration! Read about our industry employer participant Grace Fenix of Big Robin and industry guest Vivek Mishra of Aqilliz share some views on the impact of AI on data and insights careers and also then tune into some discussions from this panel.
“Only 1.5 million people in the US and about 3 million globally are practicing what we do in data analytics, insights seriously as a vocation, as a job and as a way to help people make better decisions. And if you think of that in comparison to 80-90 billion terra-bytes of data that’s being produced year on year, it’s crazy – the gap is just crazy and widening, because you can’t produce enough babies or data scientists from birth to keep up with the data deluge! It’s a small global community in the end, and I am still very connected to the people I worked with 30 years ago, as we have a common language to speak, which is always a good thing to start with, especially when you’re all entering the field.”
Grace Fenix, Founder and CEO, Big Robin, from our panel on The Future of Collaboration: Human Aided Tech Aided Human?

Biggest Concerns about AI impacting careers in Data, Marketing and Insights
I am afraid of AI becoming the tobacco of our generation — will we allow it to be supplied in abundance and the innocent and ignorant to consume it, especially minors — without warning them enough about of its harmful dangers? There are definitely benefits, but also harm to those who don’t read the not-so-fine print — that AI, no matter how much more intelligent and smart it sounds, cannot tell the truth from a lie; it’s trained to tell what it’s told so biased input means biased output; and chatGPT for example will say it does have limited data after 2021 and AI changes/learns from its user.
Net, biggest concern is how AI blurs humanity’s relationship with the truth. And in our industry especially, because of its prolific convenience, we take “what is” given by AI and lose the depth, curiosity and joy of discovery— mining the “why is”— at the core of what we do in human insights and data analytics.
Grace Fenix, Founder and CEO, Big Robin
Also check out our panel with Amanda Chen and Grace Fenix on how to find and build culturally sensitive organizations:
