“My biggest lesson was realizing that domain expertise matters more than algorithmic complexity.“

Domain expertise often matters more than algorithmic complexity in real-world machine learning, a lesson data scientist Claudia Ng learned from winning a credit scoring competition. This principle guided her shift to freelance AI consulting, where she employs a problem-first approach to deliver measurable business value for clients. Ng advises newcomers to the field to specialize in a specific role, such as ML engineering or product data science, and leverage their existing domain knowledge. She is currently focused on building an AI language learning product and is excited by the potential of text-to-speech technology to preserve endangered languages.