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

About this episode

Veronika Durgin discusses the evolving landscape of data roles in the age of AI and the skills that will be essential for data professionals.

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…

People in this episode

Host: Richie

Guest: Veronika Durgin

Topics covered

• AI in data
• data careers
• analytics engineering
• data leadership
• data modeling

Keywords

• AI
• data strategy
• data professionals
• analytics engineering
• data culture
• data modeling

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Saks, DataCamp, CDO Magazine

Products: Snowflake

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