I read an interesting market statistic recently from VentureBeats AI that stated “87% of data science projects never make it into production”. This was later validated by Gartner who added that “80% of AI projects will remain alchemy [projects], run by wizards”. I appreciate that as an industry we are still very early in our maturity with respect to data science/AI/ML lifecycle management, that AI/ML engineering practices are nascent, and that the tooling ecosystem is still emerging and expanding, but I have to wonder how much longer employers will tolerate investing in technology, tools, and people with little to no return.
