> Sales would say anything to convince buyers (campaigns) and had no idea how the technology works. You can take any sentences uttered by them and quote it to the data scientists, their reaction would be… bow, shake their head, “Yeah, not, that’s… not it.”

This is frankly par for the course in data science. I work as a data scientist/statistician for a relatively newly established (~5 years) analytics team at a large company, and the first order of business was weaning our teams off of the snake oil that grifter consulting companies were making millions selling them. The things I've seen referred to as "machine learning" and "AI" are absolutely bonkers. The reality is that most of the analytics services being sold B2B is total garbage, and yet it thrives because most customers aren't aware of why its bad.

To be fair to these consulting companies, my impression is at least some of the time they aren't knowingly selling BS, and that often times they just have very poor analysts/data scientists who have a very surface level knowledge of what they are doing, but not enough depth to realize why they can't do/aren't doing what they think they are. And the actual sales people know literally nothing but buzzwords.

These days we've been able to largely get the company away from vendors where possible and to rely on internal analytics teams, but it is still an issue when our team will come back to business partners with an answer someone doesn't want to hear, and they have external vendors essentially promising they can solve literally any problem with AI, and magically always produce the safe answer the customer wants to hear (but they never are willing to share code, the low level details of their process, or really anything that can make their analyses reproducible).