I agree with the author's opinion about

> I’ll go out on a limb and assert that most of the up front data pipelining and organizational changes which allow for it are probably more valuable than the actual machine learning piece.

Especially at non-tech companies with outdated internal technology. I've consulted at one of these and the biggest wins from the project (I left before the whole thing finished unfortunately) were overall improvements to the internal data pipeline, such as standardization and consolidation of similar or identical data from different business units.