I have noticed a number of article writers?
In my experience, these columnists are all too often more concerned with causing polemics than with the truth. Take it all with a grain of salt. Back to your question: to the extent that an in-house data scientist is just blindly and mechanically applying standard algorithms to data, then yes, he is easily replaceable with an automated script. But if that is the case, than this person should already have been fired, or should be called something other than a data scientist. Can you imagine a seismologist being replaced by an automated seismometer? A climatologist replaced by a robotic weathervane? Scientists' job is to produce understanding; automated tools make their job more efficient and effective, but unless someone has invented something truly revolutionary (say, an AI interface which understands questions from a lay user and produces comprehensive analyses), data scientists are still very much a necessity.