The analyst's job didn't shrink. It moved.

It’s tempting to think that tools which answer instantly reduce the need for human judgment. The opposite is true. When answering becomes cheap, the value shifts entirely upstream — to framing the question, defining the terms, and deciding what would actually count as evidence. The model handles the retrieval. The human owns the inquiry.

So when someone tells me the AI “gave the wrong answer,” my first question is rarely about the model. It’s: what exactly did we ask it? More often than not, the data was fine. The question was the thing that needed the work — and that, not the answer, is where real analytical expertise lives.