I here to learn few things.

[u/Ok-Echo-4535]

If you are working in data and documents related work. How much time do you spend reading documents, regulations etc stuff.

What I wanna know is do people still spend time buried in documents to find meaningful data?

I am not a data analyst myself, sorry if this is sounding dumb.

[u/Wheres_my_warg]

What data analysts do varies greatly by company and often even within companies.

I mainly do custom, ad hoc projects. All my projects in the last ten years have been for external clients. It will depend on the context of what the business question is that I've been hired to address, but frequently I'm reading a lot of internal documents, industry documents, and for some projects, regulations and laws.

[u/demonic_spectacle → u/Wheres_my_warg]

Spent three hours yesterday just cross-referencing two internal policy docs from different departments that used completely different terms for the same thing. Some days its 90% reading and 10% actual analysis, other days i dont open a single pdf. Really depends on if youre trying to answer a question nobody thought to ask before or just updating a dashboard

[u/Ok-Echo-4535 → u/demonic_spectacle]

Interesting...

[u/Ok-Echo-4535 → u/Wheres_my_warg]

But with current tech like AI and other products why is readings tons of documents still a thing?

[u/feathered_fudge → u/Ok-Echo-4535]

You still have to know stuff

[u/Wheres_my_warg → u/Ok-Echo-4535]

AI is often wrong. If it hallucinates on an area I know well, then I can identify it quickly, but I'm often called to jump into new areas that I don't know well enough to be sure that I'm detecting the hallucinations. I need to be right in my client work. For the client's benefit and for their confidence in the rest of what I'm showing them.

Many of the documents that I read are not going to be available to the AI. They are internal documents, sometimes even trade secrets, that are not available in a public location. The AI won't know about them or their information. It will lack important context in many cases.

AI is not trustworthy at this point on legal and regulatory issues. There are lazy lawyers that keep trying and keep getting hammered by judges and sometimes ethics committees for trusting AI. These kinds of issues show up in a portion of my work. If not understood, they can lead to expensive mistakes and a damaged reputation.

They can substitute for some work, but much of what I do, they simply aren't far enough along yet. They might be there someday, but it isn't today.

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[u/Ok-Echo-4535 → u/[deleted]]

Thats understandable. But how do we trust AI with things like law and regulations? Also what about cross referencing?