Most teams we work with want to say their product is AI-powered. Few have asked whether their organisation is ready to support that claim. We have observed a recurring pattern where a team commits to building a machine learning system and, after months, discovers that their data isn't clean enough to train on. The infrastructure then fails to reliably serve a model. In such cases, our diagnosis has often concluded that the foundation is the problem. Machine learning readiness is a precondition, and one must begin with a straightforward question - "Do we have the data pipeline, infrastructure and cross-functional alignment to make this sustainable beyond a PoC?" That question is what prompted our first article titled "The Machine Learning Readiness Checklist". We cover everything a team needs, from data and infrastructure to the right kind of team members. All of this must be done before committing serious engineering time and budgets. If you're a founder, engineering lead or a decision maker within your organisation who wants to build things correctly, we encourage you to read the full piece here:

https://www.algorithmic.co/blogs/the-machine-learning-checklist We'll be sharing more each week. Follow along if this is relevant to what you're building.

P.S. This article is from late 2025 but more than ever relevant.