What would be examples of such production-ready models? Things written using TensorFlow et al?
If you being paid to research a predictor or a classifier then as soon as you have a model demonstrably better than what’s running in prod, you should be able to just drop it straight into the CICD pipeline and off it goes to make money for your employer - or for you. No more chucking a prototype over the fence to a programming team to rewrite in C++ or Java to make it “prod grade”.
Right now doing this is somewhere between “state of the art” and “new normal” depending on where you sit.
The days of a researcher producing a model to be re-implemented for production by a programmer are over, or very nearly so. A working data scientist now is expected to produce something that can run in production. That’s something a PhD doesn’t teach and that many PhDs find an uphill struggle.