Jayachander Reddy Kandakatla

Guest author

Jayachander Reddy Kandakatla is senior machine learning operations (MLOps) engineer at Ford Motor Credit Company and founder of Pixis IT Inc.

CleoJ/Velocity gap

Here's what's slowing down your AI strategy — and how to fix it

Your best data science team just spent six months building a model that predicts customer churn with 90% accuracy. It’s sitting on a server, unused. Why? Because it’s been stuck in a risk review queue for a very long period of time, waiting for a committee that doesn’t understand stochastic models to sign off. This isn’t a hypothetical — it’s the daily reality in most large companies. In AI, the models move at internet speed. Enterprises don’t. Every few weeks, a new model family drops, open-source toolchains mutate and entire MLOps practices get rewritten. But in most companies, anything touching production AI has to pass through risk reviews, audit trails, change-management boards and model-risk sign-off. The result is a widening velocity gap: The research community accelerates; the enterprise stalls. This gap isn’t a headline problem like “AI will take your job.” It’s quieter and more expensive: missed productivity, shadow AI sprawl, duplicated spend and compliance drag that turns promising pilots into perpetual proofs-of-concept.

Jayachander Reddy Kandakatla