The one argument goes that if you simply view your customer as a data point you tend to lose the 'customer perspective'. However, data doesn't lie, if you can augment your results with qualitative customer feedback, this is the best scenario.

This makes me think that the tool of using personas in product development might go away.

For example, this is from the Wikipedia article on personas:

"Personas are said to be cognitively compelling because they put a personal human face on otherwise abstract data about customers.

Before we had the means to collect data and easily reach certain customer segments they played an important role, but now that we have powerful analytics to measure our decisions and new ways to interact with customers I could see personas being used less often.