I think it depends on the company. There are a lot of terrible companies that won't look at you for an ML/data science role without a PhD. That's true. There ar

I think it depends on the company. There are a lot of terrible companies that won't look at you for an ML/data science role without a PhD. That's true. There are others that will hire smart people and give them a chance. What will probably happen is that the pool of "data science" jobs will grow, but the bottom half won't be real DS. I don't mean to imply that a person can become a decent data scientist overnight. It takes years, but it can be done. On Wall Street this sort of role is called a "quant", although there's less machine learning in finance than one would expect (hard to audit). "Data scientist" is a startup quant. Just as with quant jobs, some firms will only hire PhDs with research experience, while others will take chances on smart people without it.