Data science in a post-COVID world

I am often asked about the state of data science and where we sit now from a maturity perspective. The answer is pretty interesting, especially now that it's been more than a year since COVID-19 rendered most data science models useless -- at least for a time. COVID forced companies to make a full model jump to match the dramatic shift in daily life. Models had to be rapidly retrained and redeployed to try to make sense of a world that changed overnight. Many organizations ran into a wall, but others were able to create new data science processes that could be put into production much faster and easier than what they had before.