Full Answer

There is a real skills barrier to AI readiness, but it is usually misdiagnosed as a technical one. Informatica's 2025 CDO survey put a shortage of skills and data literacy among the top obstacles at 35%, and the instinct is to read that as a need for more SQL specialists. In practice the binding constraint is the ability to frame a useful question, judge whether the answer is trustworthy, and change a decision based on it.

The mechanical part, turning that question into a query, is exactly what natural-language tools now do well. Connect an assistant to your warehouse and a marketer can ask in plain English how repeat buyers from a campaign behaved, and get correct SQL run for them. The human still has to know what to ask and how to sanity-check the result, but they no longer need to memorise join syntax to participate.

So the honest answer is that you should invest in literacy, not certifications. Build the habit of asking data questions, and SQL understanding accumulates as a by-product of watching good queries get written and run. A team that waits to hire SQL experts before engaging its data will stay readier on paper than in practice; a team that starts asking questions today gets both the answers and, eventually, the fluency.