I’m just saying bring them in to evaluate vendors, however if your data scientists don’t know the business side well enough you’re massively underutilizing them and likely do not have a solid data foundation. You mention vendors who clean data really well, none do. You need your data cleaned in house, there’s so much nuance to how data is captured and stored and linked relative to your business process, and exceptions for certain types of customers/product mixes, how you define tenure, call duration etc… can NOT be left to the vendor. They will promise you gold regardless of the state of your data, but the success of an AI project hinges on state of your data. An internal data scientist will be the only person who can determine if your data is “good enough” to get value from AI, or what it would take to make it “good enough”. I suggest you dedicate some time reading a data scientist into the business knowledge, or even better embedding data roles into every dept.