I found this article a little weak, but there is an interesting parallel.

The 10,000 hours thing is encouraging because the amount of effort you put in as far more important than your natural ability.

... Until you get to the point where everyone is already working as hard as humanly possible, at which point natural ability becomes the sorting function again.

Then train your model elsewhere and size it as appropriate for the runtime environment.

If that really isn't an option, then yes ML/AI isn't for you in this case.