09/18/2026
There’s a whole category of analytics ideas that never got explored because doing the work to find out whether they were any good could take months, or a year, of someone’s time.
That’s the shift Warren Hearnes (Former VP of Data Science, Best Buy) is pointing at. AI is compressing the distance between an idea and something you can actually evaluate. In his words, it used to require being “dumb enough to say I’m going to spend a year of my life exploring this.”
Now, with AI assistance, you can say, “I’ve got an idea. Let’s see if it works.” – and get to an answer much faster. This may end up being one of AI’s bigger effects on analytics: not just helping us execute faster but giving more good ideas a real shot.
Of course, this moves the hard part upstream. When exploring an idea was expensive, the constraint was often the time and resources required to build it. As that gets cheaper, the scarce skill becomes deciding which ideas are worth pursuing and which questions are worth asking.
Do you agree?
