If you walk into your CEOs office today and say "I can increase revenue from our site by 1 million dollars" (#) you will get a hearing. If three devs on that site do it, with a poc they will get the chance to do it 95% of the time.

But the CEO who hires a data scientist is explicitly asking that person to walk into their office and say "I can increase revenue by X" - that is their job. The website dev does not have that job.

And there are two views on this problem - the CEO did the right thing by hiring someone to explicitly optimise the site - there are improvements to be made, create the right organisation so that those improvements flow to company.

Or there is the other argument, that the organisation is stifling innovation from below, and that the CEO should have been actively soliciting improvements from dev team and elsewhere

Generally both are right

Not this place. Our department produced multiple designs and products that had substantial positive revenue. We even did some ML projects with our existing team and/or SaaS products. Anything that didn't come from the head office was treated as a rogue experiment.

That's why you have management to listen, decide direction and argue about it. Seems like engineering management wasn't doing it's job so someone hired a Data Scientist outside their hierarchy to actually get things done.