Is Data Visualization dead?

This post is not written by AI, so unfortunately, you need to bear with all the human mistakes a non-native English speaker can commit. 💀

The idea to dive deeper into this topic came from the fact that I recently came across a website that would predict whether I'm already retired without me noticing. I ran it on both my split personalities: my website and on LinkedIn. It was funny to see that in my work-life, where I do all the advanced AI stuff, I'm very close to being replaced, while my supposedly extinct dataviz career path seems to be thriving compared to the automation hamster wheel.

So then, I wandered through my website, and the question hit me: Am I the Stonehenge still standing in the world of AI, where agents have their own social media? Everything I've written here on this tucked-away corner of the internet seems like it was created in a different lifetime, while I was just rebranding everything a year ago. Outdated as it may seem, I'll keep this blog up as a memento or graveyard of an era when output was still linked to hard work. 🪦

I've been doing this for so long that the first-ever version of Tableau I downloaded was 9.2, in 2016. There were a lot of exciting updates, products, and enhancements in the dataviz landscape until it suddenly stopped being fun around 1-2 years ago, and at least in my case, the scapegoat was AI. I always felt that storytelling as a hobby is based on that flex, that YOU can calculate this. YOU can come up with this crazy idea. YOU can hack the system until it does what you've imagined. I remember spending nights awake, refusing to go to sleep until that chart bent exactly how I wanted it to bend. That needed brainwork, resilience, passion, dedication... and came with the high reward that you've accomplished something that didn't seem possible, and you're the first to do it. I feel old saying this, but those were the times! 👵🏻

Now I can just give Claude a link and say I want the same, but even better, and make it blue (exactly what I'm doing right now to recreate my website for free, instead of paying hundreds of euros for it per year). I'd be lying if I said this doesn't come in handy in work situations, but for personal dataviz projects, I proclaim fun as officially dead. What I enjoyed the most was the slow-cooked nature of this process, something that's in the works for weeks, if not months. The fact that I knew this data inside and out. That I was riding my bike when an idea hit a nail in my brain. That I asked real humans to give me feedback before publishing it.

You'd be right to ask why I don't just do things how I used to if I don't care anyway.

Thanks for asking! I don't feel it's anything special these days. The spark is lost, as well as the motivation. These slow-burn activities are not valued in the public eye anymore. Imagine me saying in 2026 that I rewatched 40+ hours of Twin Peaks to manually count the coffees the characters drank just to make a visualization out of it. A few years ago, I received comments on it saying, "You’re a pretty crazy dude. have an upvote", and "This took some dedication, man". Today, it would sound something like this: "Are you crazy? There's this XY AI app or flow that would do it for you in 5 minutes."

In a professional work context, there were a couple of years when specialists were needed in data teams. We had a lot of Data Visualization Expert and Dashboard Designer positions, and people who just did Tableau and nothing else were thriving. We received 5 LinkedIn messages a day and felt on top of the world. Now companies need generalists who can do everything from modeling tasks to stakeholder management, data analysis, reporting, and AI engineering. I personally spend a maximum of 5% of my time doing reporting in Looker (and calling that a data visualization tool would be an exaggeration, to say the least), but I have to say I'm not mad about it. I always loved learning, adapting to the new circumstances, and pivoting careers when needed, and I'm not tired of it yet! But...

will I do dataviz ever again?

Probably - that's kind of encoded in my DNA, and I have some exciting projects sitting in a drawer. I'm just not sure when and how, but you see how the Y2K trends we hoped never to see again are cool now?

Dataviz was always a hobby for me, and sometimes the constellations aligned in a way that I could earn my money from it, but this passion and my paycheque have long since parted ways. In my day-to-day, I'm one of the contributors to the AI buzz, and would be bold enough to say that what we're doing is at the forefront of automation. In fact, even on a personal level, I enjoy getting rid of the admin burden and the costs I had before AI. But this blog is my sacred playground where the only person who can push me to do things faster or better is me. And I was never someone to sweat something out just to produce content, and never will be. If the fate of what I believe in is to sink into oblivion, then come what may. AI didn't kill dataviz, it just took the fun out of it. Maybe it can be resurrected at some point as well, and who knows? That could be the niche that keeps me in the job market in 2027.🫳🏻🎤