#A personal data scientist for every employee

Notion shared a good article about how they gave their business teams AI agents to query their internal data:

How we built a personal data scientist for every Notion employee

It's a story that sounds familiar. In my experience, the data team is often a bottleneck for the many questions coming from business teams. Data analysts are a scarce resource, but they are the ones who know how the data is structured, and have the technical skills to extract it, then turn it into an analysis that (in principle) answers the operational teams' questions and need for insights.

AI can dramatically shorten this pipeline, from raw data all the way up to actual business insight. An agent will easily understand database schemas, write the queries, and produce a full analysis, with tables and charts included, that answers the business teams' questions in plain English.

One prerequisite is that the company's data has to be somehow documented, at least defining non-obvious tables and fields. It doesn't have to be perfect though: AI navigates complexity far better than humans do. Focus on the ambiguous fields and metrics definitions, let the AI guess the rest, and use it to write the full documentation much faster.

Every data stack now includes a built-in AI agent to query the data, but adoption is slow. I think it should be a priority, though: I haven't met a single company where business teams say of their data team: "they're well staffed, very responsive, and fully understand how the data connects to our business reality."