#361 If You Want AI to Work, Fix This Boring Thing First with Veronika Durgin, VP of Data at Saks

Every conversation about AI in data eventually arrives at the same question: which roles survive, and which ones get automated away? Generative AI can already draft SQL, build dashboards, and run exploratory analysis — but it still can't sit with a business stakeholder and untangle what "customer" actually means across five teams. For data professionals, that shifts the day-to-day from production work toward translation, modeling, and judgment. So which skills are worth doubling down on? Which roles are becoming central, and which are quietly disappearing? And what should anyone hiring — or being hired — be paying attention to right now?

Veronika Durgin is the VP of Data at Saks Global, where she leads data strategy across the luxury retail group. A full-stack data executive with more than two decades of experience spanning database administration, data engineering, platform architecture, data modeling, and analytics, Veronika is a Snowflake Data Superhero and a member of CDO Magazine's Global Editorial Board. She writes about data modeling, data culture, and data leadership on her Substack and Medium.

In the episode, Richie and Veronika explore the future of data careers under AI, why analytics engineering becomes the catch-all role, the skills and hiring shifts data leaders are making, centralized data with decentralized analytics, keeping enterprise data teams agile, conceptual data modeling as the unglamorous prerequisite to AI, semantic layers, agentic commerce, and much more.

Links Mentioned in the Show:

• Connect with Veronika: LinkedIn
• Veronika's Substack: Think. Solve. Repeat.
• dbt — referenced as the origin of "analytics engineering"
• Open Data Science Conference (ODSC) — Veronika's recent talk on data and company politics
• Amazon "two-way door" decisions — Bezos shareholder letter
• Jessica Talisman — Veronika's recommendation for knowledge graphs and ontologies
• Juan Sequeda — referenced on semantic layers and knowledge graphs
• Catalog & Cocktails podcast (hosted by Juan Sequeda)
• AI-Native Course: Intro to AI for Work
• Related Episode: Creating an AI-First Data Team with Bilal Zia, Head of Data Science & Analytics at Duolingo

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