Data Analyst
A professional who turns business data into decisions via SQL, dashboards, and statistical analysis.
What is Data Analyst?
A Data Analyst is the bridge between raw business data and the people making decisions. They write SQL, build dashboards, run hypothesis tests, and present findings to stakeholders who do not speak SQL. In 2026, "AI-augmented analyst" — analysts who lean on Claude/ChatGPT to ship 3x faster — is the new baseline expectation.
Day-to-day: pull data via SQL, clean it in Python or directly in the warehouse, model it in Power BI or Tableau, present in a meeting, repeat. The best analysts also automate their recurring work — replacing weekly stakeholder reports with self-serving dashboards or LLM-augmented summarisers.
Salary in India 2026: ₹4–9 LPA at entry, ₹12–18 LPA mid-career, ₹20–30 LPA at lead, ₹35–60+ LPA at director. The role is faster to enter than Data Scientist and has more open positions overall.
Data Analyst is the most accessible AI-adjacent career in India — open to non-CS grads, faster to enter than Data Science, and high in demand.
A Data Analyst at a Hyderabad SaaS company builds the CMO's weekly dashboard, runs A/B tests on the pricing page, and uses Claude to summarise customer-feedback NPS comments into executive insights — all before lunch.
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