I agree AI could probably do a decent job on Kaggle problems. Of course, almost no DS job is building models with well-defined objectives and perfect data. The DS and MLE folks I work with mostly spend their time reframing ill-posed product requests into ML systems that can be maintained and improved with feedback loops.

A _huge_ part of a DS is saying "No" to bad ideas posed by non-experts. The issue with LLMs is all they ever say is "Yes" and "Wow, that's such a great idea!"

The data scientist is like in house lawyers in that respect.