Agentic data analysts: automating ad hoc pulls inflates demand, not output
Automating "can you pull this for me" doesn't shrink the queue — it grows it. Incident.io's own agentic "data brain" exposed the real bottleneck: not SQL, but institutional knowledge that never shows up in INFORMATION_SCHEMA or a semantic layer. Text-to-SQL quietly bakes in judgment calls nobody documented, shifting the analyst's job from writing queries to validating them. The takeaway mirrors what a solo analyst's six-week experiment found: easy access begets more requests, so the role becomes framing the right question, not executing queries.