Data science and data analytics are often confused, but they are distinct fields. Data science is the broader umbrella term encompassing tasks like finding patterns in large datasets, training machine learning models, and deploying AI applications. Data analytics, a specialization within data science, focuses on querying, interpreting, and visualizing datasets. Data scientists work iteratively, forming hypotheses and testing them using data, following a data science lifecycle with seven phases, starting with identifying a problem or opportunity.