About this episode

The episode discusses whether companies should build internal data teams or consider managed analytics as a more efficient alternative.

Do companies really need to build expensive internal data teams anymore? In this episode of The Data Nerd Podcast, Nisar Ahmed sits down with Mikhail Christiansen to challenge one of the biggest assumptions in modern analytics: that every growing company needs to hire a full internal data team from scratch. Mikhail shares why many organizations are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars building data infrastructure, hiring engineers, and implementing tools before they ever generate meaningful business insights. The conversation explores the hidden costs of traditional analytics teams, the risks of bad hires and poor implementations, and why a managed analytics approach may be a faster and smarter path for many businesses. They also dive into how AI is changing expectations around productivity, analytics, and decision-making and why companies that don't modernize their data infrastructure could struggle to compete in the AI era. This isn't about saying data teams are unnecessary. It's about asking whether every company actually needs to build and own one themselves. Tune in to learn: Why many companies overspend building internal data teams The real cost of hiring data…

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