Very much agreed. See my comment in this thread. The value of being able to build decent ML models is decreasing rapidly, so the difference maker will be acquir

Very much agreed. See my comment in this thread. The value of being able to build decent ML models is decreasing rapidly, so the difference maker will be acquiring better/more data (which you often have little control over) or better feature engineering (which is basically gaining domain knowledge through better skills in mathematics, problem solving and reasoning). You showed that you were the better problem solver against 5 other consulting companies with teams that became used to wow-ing naive companies with little effort.