The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: AI, SaaS, and the End of Job Titles with Eric Dodds and John Wessel

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for developers. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show. You'll get to meet our guests and hear about the topics we're going to cover. If they're interesting to you, you can catch the full-length show when it drops on Wednesday. Welcome back to the Data Stack Show. Today, you get me and John talking about data topics. We thought it would be fun for us to just shoot the breeze on a

bunch of data stuff and so we're gonna talk about a number of different things on the show today. John, we don't have a guest so I'm just gonna say welcome to you. Welcome to you as well Eric. Thank you I feel so welcome. OK. I feel like we're ringing the rag of AI on the show. And no pun intended. I actually didn't plan on that joke. I know that seems I really didn't. I was thinking ringing a jive ringing. But it worked really well.

Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Talking about AI but Really we have to because it's we're living through Such a fundamental shift in so many things and it's happening in real time I feel like when this stuff first started coming out with the first couple iterations of GPT. It was Really over rotating on a on so many podcasts and news articles about like okay, this is crazy, but it's come so far that It really is. I think the big topic right you know what I've wondered recently What other thing if we had as much hype about it as AI?

Would progress really fast if billions and billions of dollars got put into it right because part of the success of AI is not Like yeah, there's a lot of Advancement there. That's cool. Yeah, but it's also the crazy amount of investment from Like every major technology company to make it progress. Yep. Yes. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that Yeah. Yeah, it's an interesting question. It's also interesting to to think back on the history of technology, even the conversations around data specifically, and there just aren't it seems like there aren't that many fundamental changes as as significant as this I

would agree and I don't think we've talked about this before but one of the my original attractions to data was that it wasn't gonna change so much right so like it was on the list because like you get into tech and you're like oh front end like web frameworks the jokes always like you get into tech and you're like, oh front end like web frameworks The jokes always like oh that changes every like five minutes. There's always a new way something you're entering and then it's like well databases and sequel Those have been around a long time. Well, yeah, that's not gonna fundamentally change and there's practical reasons As far as on the front end stuff like you can change things with like a lot less consequences Typically, yeah back end and then you get into like the and you're like, that might not be true anymore.

I love that, generally, that you were like, this data's not going to change that much, right? And the pace of change, even outside of AI, is accelerated dramatically. Even tooling, right? The tooling was a couple major vendors all using the exact same language. All right, that's a wrap for the prequel. The full-length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don't miss it.