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Start with Data, End with Value

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AI Can Do More for You. But Can It Help You Think Better? analyst blog

If you follow AI influencers, you’ve probably seen the same promise many times. AI can write your SQL. It can clean your data. It can build a dashboard. It can create a presentation. It can summarize a meeting. All of that is useful. But I think we’re sometimes looking at the value of AI from the wrong direction. We keep asking: “What can AI do for me?” As analysts, I think we should also be asking: “How can AI help me deliver more value?” For years, we’ve focused on becoming

Victor Peña

Oct 53 min read

What Earthquake Drills Taught Me About Data Incidents

The alarm goes off, and everyone already knows what to do. That's the entire point of an earthquake drill. Nobody expects a disaster that day. The goal is to avoid making critical decisions for the first time during a crisis. September is a month that reminds many of us in Mexico of that lesson. It's a month associated with earthquake awareness, emergency drills, and the understanding that preparation matters long before something goes wrong. Recently, that got me thinking ab

Victor Peña

Sep 143 min read

Your KPI Improved. So What? Using AI to Put Your Analysis in Context

One of the first things we learn as analysts is to compare performance against history. Is revenue growing? Is conversion improving? Are registrations higher than last quarter? Is the completion rate better than last year? We pull the data, calculate the metrics, build the chart, and find the trend. And then someone in the meeting asks a very simple question: “Is that actually good?” That’s where things get interesting. Imagine you’re analyzing a website form. You look at the

Victor Peña

Aug 313 min read

Before Your Next Executive Presentation, Put AI in the Empty Chair

One of the most important parts of being a Business Analyst is not just finding the insight. It’s communicating it. We can spend hours analyzing data, validating numbers, building dashboards, and understanding what is happening. But if we can’t explain what those insights mean to the business, the analysis hasn’t reached its full potential. The Importance of Communication This becomes even more crucial when presenting to senior leaders. As analysts, we’re often responsible fo

Victor Peña

Aug 173 min read

I Stopped Writing Better Prompts. I Started Onboarding AI Like a New Teammate. (senior analist secret to better outputs).

When Copilot became widely available, I did what most people did. I experimented with prompts, watched videos about “perfect prompts,” and tried different prompt engineering techniques. Some helped, but most only slightly improved the results. Then I noticed a pattern. When a new Business Analyst joins my team, I don’t expect them to deliver meaningful work from a single instruction. I don’t assign a task and hope for the best. I onboard them. We cover the business, customers

Victor Peña

Aug 103 min read

Overcoming the Analyst’s Fear of Being Wrong

When you’re starting your career, it’s completely normal to be afraid of making mistakes. You want to do things right, follow every instruction, and prove you can be trusted with the work. After all, your job isn’t just what you do — it’s a big part of your life, your reputation, and how you measure your own growth. But that same fear that pushes you to be careful in the beginning can quietly start to limit you as you grow. You second-guess your ideas. You wait for someone el

Victor Peña

Nov 3, 20252 min read

If Trust Is Your Most Valuable Asset, Time Is Your Most Valuable Resource

If trust determines your influence , time determines your capacity to sustain it. You can’t build or maintain trust if your days are fragmented, reactive, or filled with work that doesn’t move anything forward. Time is what allows consistency, thoughtfulness, and follow-through — the very things that make others see you as dependable. Without control of your time, even the most skilled analyst ends up running from one request to another, always busy but rarely effective. Guar

Victor Peña

Oct 27, 20252 min read

Why Technical Skills Won’t Take You All the Way.

I still remember a meeting early in my career that changed the way I saw analytics. I was presenting the results of a detailed analysis, confident that my SQL was clean, my visualizations were polished, and my model predictions made sense. I had spent hours validating data, checking assumptions, making sure every number added up. Everything was going smoothly until someone asked a simple question: “So… what would be best for the business?” I froze for a second. I knew the dat

Victor Peña

Oct 20, 20252 min read

From Order-Taker to Partner: Growing as an Analyst in a Centralized Organization

When I worked in a centralized analytics team, my days were filled with requests. My manager would come to me with business requirements — “Marketing needs a new report,” “Sales wants these numbers,” “Finance asked for a breakdown.” At first, I didn’t think much about it. That’s how the process worked: requests came in, I delivered analyses, dashboards, and reports. But over time, something started to feel off. I realized I was out of context. The projects kept coming, but th

Victor Peña

Oct 14, 20252 min read