>My personnal experience with data scientist and startups is that they're hired much much too early, when the product has a lot more fundamental issues to solve

>My personnal experience with data scientist and startups is that they're hired much much too early, when the product has a lot more fundamental issues to solve, and only because it looks cool to say that you're doing AI. Not just startups, but big established companies as well. At bigger companies not only do you have data and infrastructure issues, you also have business process and political issues. I've seen more than a few cases where fixing a business process would have a much higher ROI than a model, but it's easier and cheaper to hire a data scientist and make a big noise about it than it is to admit your business process (that includes 50+ people) is a mess and do the work to fix it.