A personal anecdote to support your point: The first company I worked for in Europe was a well-established ML company that had been doing predictive analytics l

A personal anecdote to support your point: The first company I worked for in Europe was a well-established ML company that had been doing predictive analytics long (10+ years) before the current fad. Founded by a former professor from CERN, and staffed about 90% from CERN postdocs. I was the only member of my team who was not a co-author on the Higgs boson discovery paper. So yeah, people at CERN are pretty well aware of what can be done with ML.