Technology trend that may impact your target career
On October 18th, 2021, during the Apple Event, the SVP of Hardware Technologies: Johny Srouji, challenged the audience with computer architecture keywords when he was trying to sell their new MacBook models. Making use of graphs demonstrating the CPU/GPU performances with respect to the power consumption he made a data-driven comparison to show how power efficient the new MacBook models are compared to their current industry-leading contemporaries. While his presentation reflected domain expertise, any interested audience even without any background in computer systems could understand the message and make an informed decision.
This trend in the industry of appealing to larger audience groups without hesitating to make use of relevant scientific contexts while selling a product will eventually force the business/analytics side of the world to equip themselves with the familiarity, if not the expertise, of necessary scientific/technical background. Hence, in the long run, I see myself moving towards a more heterogeneous business analytics track with domain-specific and inter-disciplinary knowledge from Natural Language Processing (NLP), Social Network Analysis (SNA), and Cloud Computing (CC).
Integration of Artificial Intelligence in the business world has opened endless possibilities to understand the market, optimize the products to meet consumers' needs, and automate this process as much as possible. However, this has also made the market very competitive. In today's market, even someone as gifted as Steve Jobs would have to do the extra homework to sell the product. Today's consumers are more informed and are provided with several other competitive options with equally good technical merits, or features reasonable to their cost. To stand a chance in this game, one must make the most out of every aspect that is controllable and contribute to multidimensional aspects involved in end-to-end product engineering and sales.
This is where the knowledge of NLP is so powerful. Leveraging the state-of-the-art NLP tools, one can understand the product reviews better, help in building automatic-yet-powerful customer service tools, while also making use of SNA to make sense of the buzz among consumers in social media outlets to understand the consumer need and optimize the advertisement scheme. Similarly, recent studies suggest that most shopping happens on a portable handheld device. Smartphones and tablets have redefined e-commerce in a way that is convenient for all. This transition is best facilitated if one can make the most out of cloud resources (computing and storage). As a business analyst, I can function to my optimum only if I am familiar with cloud resources to use the data at my disposal both effectively and efficiently. This will also enable me to contribute to building scalable e-commerce tools. Considering the increasing trend of appealing to the audience with data-driven comparisons and explicit functional/scientific/technical merits of the products, I believe I will need to equip myself with domain-specific and necessary interdisciplinary knowledge in order to make an all-around impact as a business analyst.