In my experience you basically have to give data scientists direct responsibility for a business process in order to ensure that their models are relevant to an

In my experience you basically have to give data scientists direct responsibility for a business process in order to ensure that their models are relevant to and actually get utilized in the process. Forecasting is a great example of something that every retail company needs, and that data science is supposed to help with. But if you make planners responsible for planning and ordering (minimizing surpluses and stockouts), and make the data scientists responsible for developing forecasting models, the planners won't trust or use the forecasting models--they'll just continue making their own personal models in Excel. If you want to actually solve a business problem with machine learning, then you have to actually give the data scientist decisionmaking authority in the business process and responsibility for the business result.