It's a bit more nuanced. It's true that you do research looking for insights that would give you a competitive advantage, and you don't find many - and very often the results don't justify the cost. On the other hand, if you don't do that, you risk staying behind, so some form of data analysis is absolutely necessary for any business - you can't just run on your gut feeling especially once you exceed a certain size.

As a side note, people tend to be very unimaginative in the initial stages of data analysis: very often they just take the data they have instead of thinking what data they need to have. And obviously the results correspond to the initial limitations. So much effort is put into data munging and other stages when your inputs are incomplete or plain irrelevant to what your business actually needs.

Maybe the executive is asking the wrong questions and puts it on the data scientist. Hint : 'Can you create a report that shows that my last decision was a success ?' is not a good question.