For analysts working through the AI shift. Building the chart got easy. The analysis is where the value went. Tool-agnostic notes on how to think through a project, direct the work, and spend your time on the part that actually matters.
The essay the whole publication grows out of. It opens on a confession, reframes the old job as assembly mistaken for analysis, names the automation fear honestly, and then turns it. Tool-agnostic, plain-spoken, no pitch.
Get Issue 01 when it landsThe machine came for the assembly. It did not come for the thinking. It raised the stakes on the thinking and removed the hiding place.
For twenty years an analyst's hours went to the mechanics. AI collapsed the assembly. The value did not vanish. It moved back to the part we always rushed past.
The thing you spend your time on is the thing that is actually valuable. A worked look at an ordinary analyst week, before and after the shift, and what to do with the hours you got back.
Get it in your inboxFour things the tools cannot do for you, in whatever tool you happen to use. Every essay here serves one of them.
The question you were handed is rarely the one worth answering. Finding the real one is most of the job now.
How I find itCheap assembly means everything can be built. That is the trap. Choosing what to throw out is where judgment shows.
How I chooseTell the AI what to make, then catch it when it is confidently wrong. You cannot direct what you do not understand.
How I directSay what the data knows and what it does not. The honesty around the chart is the craft the business pays for.
Why it mattersAI did not remove the need to know analysis. It raised the stakes and removed the hiding place. The analyst who can think is the one AI makes more valuable, not less.
It is not a course about a tool. Tools change. This is how I think. How I find the real question under the one I was handed. How I decide what is worth building and what to throw out. How I direct the AI to do the work, and how I catch it when it is confidently wrong.
It is for the working analyst in the AI era. Not the beginner trying to break in. You are already in, and you have decided to move up instead of out.
I am building it in the open with a small founding cohort. Subscribers hear first.
Hear when the cohort opensEric Summers. Analyst first, builder second. Directed Analysis is a Directed Building property, tied to no product, and it never will be.
See the data stories at ericsummers.ioOne essay a week on the thinking the tools cannot do for you. No tool tutorials, no pitch, unsubscribe any time.
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