Data scientists come at a premium, posing a challenge for any enterprise outside of Google, Facebook, Amazon.com and Apple. CIOs who have been fortunate enough to poach them from big tech companies or lure them from academia beam with pride as they talk about all of the business insights they’re going to generate with their data gurus.
IBM expects the demand for data scientists to soar by 28 percent by 2020 — and that figure may be conservative. To address the talent shortage, companies are building software that does that heavy lifting for companies, effectively creating “citizen” data scientists out of corporate employees that are not embedded in IT.