[rwilson4]

Or maybe businesses see more of a need for causal reasoning, with or without a controlled, randomized experiment. If you're making a decision, you need to have some model of how your decision affects outcomes you care about. But that model needs to be causal--predictive models can be useful starting points but may also lead you astray due to spurious correlations.

Economists are trained to approach these kinds of problems methodically, so it makes total sense to me that there is high demand.