WhatsInDemand / will AI replace…
Will AI replace data scientists?
Based on live job postings — updated September 2026
There are 820 live data scientists openings right now. Across the roughly 3,300 fast-growing companies we track, 69% of current data scientists openings now ask for AI skills. The work is changing, not going away.
What AI is actually changing
AI shows up directly in these openings: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, LLMs. That is the part of the job changing fastest.
Employers still ask most for: Python, SQL, Communication, Data Science, Statistics, Computer Science — the parts of the work people are hired to own.
The longer answer for data scientists
Data science is one of the jobs people worry about most, because the tools are good at exactly the things data scientists do — writing queries, building charts, fitting a quick model. A lot of that first-pass work is now a few sentences to an assistant instead of an afternoon of code.
But the hard part of the job was never the code. It is asking the right question, knowing when a number is lying to you, and turning a messy result into a decision a team will actually trust. The tools do not know your business, and they cannot tell a real signal from a fluke. Across the roughly 3,300 fast-growing companies we track, openings still lean heavily on that judgment, with AI and machine-learning skills now expected on top of it, not instead of it.
So the honest read: the routine analysis is getting cheap, and the people who can frame the problem and defend the answer are getting more valuable. If you work with data, lean into the parts that need context and taste — the tool can draw the chart, but it cannot decide what the chart means.
Who's hiring right now
| Company | Open roles |
|---|---|
| Artefact | 20 |
| OpenAI | 19 |
| 16 | |
| QuEra Computing, Inc. | 12 |
| Xometry | 12 |
| 11 |
See the full Data Scientist data page →