Artificial Intelligence with Microsoft Power BI

Chapter 11. Data Science Languages: Python and R in Power BI

In 2012, an article came out in the Harvard Business Review calling data scientists “the sexiest job of the 21st century.” In many ways, the article was predicting the future we live in today—that there would be this occupation of highly educated professionals in business using statistics, programming, and the scientific method to make discoveries from big data. Where the article struggled though was in giving a more precise description of what data scientists actually do. The job title was still new enough that the authors were even compelled to put “data scientist” in quotes, indicating that the term had not yet gained acceptance.¹

Companies since then have greatly increased hiring for this role. As of 2022, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported there were 36,500 data scientists in the United States alone and expected that number to grow by 23% over the next decade.² Data scientists today are more prevalent than ever and work across a wide range of industries.

It is still true that data scientists are inherently multidisciplinary and practice a diverse set of skills. What has changed since the Harvard Business Review article is that we have gained clarity about their job functions. There is now greater understanding that data scientists solve problems using machine learning and artificial intelligence (neither of which were mentioned in the article).

One common way to describe the field of data science today is ...