Is Data Science loosing all that hype?

All over the world companies are making cuts, the COVID-19 has lead to a major economic downfall, and companies are struggling to stay afloat by reassessing their strategies and priorities. This has made companies realize the actual value of data science in business and things are not looking good. There have been mass cuts and layoffs in tech industries including data scientists and AI specialists and many are saying that the hype over data science is finally coming down.

Over the last five years the data science field has bloomed with a soaring speed and talent in data science has increased exponentially but it is expectant of companies to let this department go as when we look at direct business value, data science, unfortunately, don’t add much – they fail to make the essential need-to-be list. Hence, the demand for data scientists will significantly decrease in the foreseeable future.

Dipanjan Sarkar, a Data Science Lead at Applied Materials talks about AI and lose business models saying, “The last couple of years, the economy had been doing quite well, and since every company wanted to join the AI race, they started pulling up these data science teams. But, they didn’t do the due diligence in hiring. They didn’t have a clear vision in mind as to how their AI strategy is actually going to help. Companies may think that they’re not getting any tangible value from large data science teams. This can trigger a move to cut down the staff, which may be non-essential “.

Most of the core business is done by engineering and manual processes and data science just adds the cherry on top. AI, machine learning, and data science are only valuable if t data science creates money or save it. Companies currently are focusing on cash curves and ventures like data science have become big questions thus when companies make cuts, data scientists will be the first to let go.

“People need to understand that data science is nothing special than any other IT related field. Furthermore, it is a non-essential work. I firmly believe that data science people will get fired first than engineers in any company’s worst situation (like Covid-19 pandemic),” according to Swapnil Jadhav, Principal Scientist (Applied Research) at DailyHunt.