I worked for a data analytics consultancy for about 6 months, filled with data scientist types - the statistics and decision trees type.
One of the bigger projects was looking at computer vision to get a robot to detect when a pipe was busted underwater.
I asked the CTO about it and they said they were going to do it by teaching a mini off the shelf robot to locate a beer bottle in the office and transfer learn from there. I mentioned that would be highly unlikely for several reasons and was quickly ushered away from their pet project.
Suffice to say they eventually had to negotiate the final project scope down just a bit to offline binary image classification (broken vs. not broken).
So even a company filled with so called data scientists can fall into the trap of believing the snake oil.
Addendum: not necessarily believing their own snake oil I suppose, totally possible that they were just naive about the capabilities after reading too many wired/ars articles.