AI is pointless without the underlying skills to acquire and clean data.

If all you ever plan to do is take off-the-shelf data from some repository and teach yourself the mechanics of tensor flow or the others then by all means go ahead.

But if you expect to use AI in novel ways in novel applications truly new ways then you must understand how to acquire and create clean viable data.

That is a real grind for many. Unfortunately that is what many “data engineers“ are doing in practice.

It is a valuable skill but you might even have to get good at Excel.