Sara Altman
Sara Altman is a developer advocate on the AI Core team at Posit, where she focuses on how AI can be effectively and thoughtfully used for data science. She co-authors the Posit AI newsletter with Simon Couch. Previously, she helped build Posit Academy and taught data science and R at Stanford.
Session
How do we build competent data analysis agents? Data analysis requires a willingness to pause, question conclusions, and dig into subtleties. Frontier LLMs, however, are optimized to push tasks toward completion, not to slow down when something seems off. This tendency works well for coding agents, where success is often verifiable. But for data analysis, verification is more complicated, and autonomous work by the agent can be at odds with the spirit of the discipline. Drawing on our experience building data analysis agents, we'll share evaluations that expose where LLM-driven analysis goes wrong and design patterns that keep analyses correct, transparent, and reproducible.