Imagine a world where business users simply fire up their analytics AI tool, ask for some insights, and get a clear and accurate response in return. That’s the dream, isn’t it? Is it just around the corner, or is it years away? Or is that vision embarrassingly misguided at its core? The very real humans who responded to our listener survey wanted to know where and how AI would be fitting into the analyst’s toolkit, and, frankly, so do we! Maybe they (and you!) can fire up ol’ Claude and ask it to analyze this episode with Juliana Jackson from the Standard Deviation podcast and Beyond the Mean Substack to find out!

Links to Resources Mentioned in the Show

• Standard Deviation podcast


• Beyond the Mean Substack


• Simo Ahava


• Alban Gérôme


• Jim Sterne


• Till Büttner


• Tim Ceuppens


• Georgi Georgiev


• Ton Wesseling


• Diablo II


• Jason Packer


• Son of Anton


• Small language models (SLMs)


• Hugging Face


• Put a Bird On It!


• Kelly Rowland texting Nelly with Excel


• Krista Seiden


• Conductrics Blog


• Matt Gershoff


• Cursor


• Semantic Textual Analysis (Natural Language Processing) Ft. Juliana Jackson & Krasimir Bambalov


• The Plea – The Incredible Story of Smallpox and the First Vaccine


• This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like | Carole Cadwalladr


• The EU AI Act Explained: A Guide for Anyone Building or Using AI


• Salugenology (WHY HUMANS REQUIRE HOBBIES) with Julia Hotz


• NPR: With social prescribing, hanging out, movement and arts are doctor’s order


• MeasureCamp Chicago Registration


• Christopher Berry


• MacGyver: Are Large Language Models Creative Problem Solvers?

Photo by Aerps.com on Unsplash

Episode Transcript

00:00:05 .73 [Announcer]: Welcome to the Analytics Power Hour. Analytics topics covered conversationally and sometimes with explicit language.

00:00:14 .49 [Michael Helbling]: Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Analytics Power Hour. This is episode 278. You know, these days, every device in your home, for some reason, wants to connect to the Wi-Fi. I mean, does my coffee machine want to write poetry or something, or give me sports scores? I guess sometimes the capabilities and features available might not fit the function of the thing. And maybe this is an intro to a podcast about where AI might fit into data analysis. So recognizing that AI is most likely here to stay, let’s, I guess, dive into it. First, let me introduce my co-host, Val Kroll. How’s it going?

00:00:51 .74 [Val Kroll]: You always do that to me. You give me the most intro.

00:00:54 .80 [Michael Helbling]: I was so close. No, I do it to everybody in fairness. I love doing the how you’re going ever since I learned it many years ago.

00:01:02 .57 [Tim Wilson]: Well, I’m good.

00:01:03 .23 [Michael Helbling]: But I try to only use it on Australians. OK, well, good. I need to get you a more Chicago hello. How’s you guys? That’s so New York.

00:01:14 .39 [Tim Wilson]: We’ll work on that.

00:01:15 .51 [Michael Helbling]: We’ll work on it. We’ll work on it. We’ll work on it. We’ll workshop it. All right. And Tim Wilson, big old Howdy partner.

00:01:22 .80 [Tim Wilson]: How y’all doing?

00:01:24 .34 [Michael Helbling]: There you go. Get back to your Sour Lake, Texas roots. There you go. And I’m Michael Hubling. And today, I’m really excited about our guest. Juliana Jackson is an associate director of data and digital experience at Moenks. She’s also the co-host of the Steender Deviations podcast. And we all love her newsletter, Beyond the Mean, on Substack. And today, she is our guest. Welcome to the show, Juliana.

00:01:48 .14 [Juliana Jackson]: Thank you. And I should answer with this very Eastern European accent so I can fit the same stuff that you guys were doing. You see, I can actually speak.

00:01:57 .16 [Michael Helbling]: You’re Europeans? What?

00:02:01 .61 [Juliana Jackson]: I was trying to speak the Eastern European accent when I speak. You see, I can speak like this too if I want to. That’s how I actually sound.

00:02:10 .13 [Michael Helbling]: I like it. Well, this is actually sort of a long time in the making because I think, yeah, I think so. All of us have been reading and sort of a lot of your recent newsletter posts and passing them around to each other and talking about them. And so we always find that when that happens, we’re sort of like, okay, we need to get this person on the show with us so we can have a conversation. So we’re really excited to have you today. And I think our first and most burning question is, how did you get Simo Ahava to do a podcast with you? No, just kidding.

00:02:43 .16 [Juliana Jackson]: Listen. Listen. So every measure camp that I used to go like maybe a year or two years ago, Everybody was telling me, it’s so nice that you’re doing, Simo lets you do his podcast. And I’m thinking about Alban, specifically, thanks Alban, if you’re listening to this. So what had happened was, actually, the podcast was done by myself in the beginning, and I actually had team as a guest, and we had one of the most esoteric dope episodes ever. We’re talking about segmentation and horoscope and colonization, and correlation was so cool. I’ve always been a big fan of Tim and I still can’t believe he talks to me sometimes. And he knows that because he told me to stop, which I’m clearly not doing it. But anyway. So I was working at CXO back then. So they were sponsoring the podcast. It’s pretty expensive to run a podcast, as you guys know. And then it was like the Spot