[mindcrime]

But you gotta get there first, and many businesses haven't.

Agreed. But many have as well. So I'll still argue that there are more potential positions for people doing "applied ML" than there are for quants. I'm open to being proven wrong though.

And even if they have, userbase-wise, they need to build the infrastructure (through web & mobile devs, backend engineers, data scientists, etc.) to log, store, and clean all that data before they can apply machine-learning to it.

We're working on a MLaaS offering to help reduce the need for a lot of that stuff. And there are some offerings in that space already.