I'm still not sure what successful AI implementations there have been. Stuff like Amazon/Spotify recommendations seem sensible. Is there anything else out there that is impressive?
Autocomplete on emails which allows me to tab over for common statements. But I agree - the places where AI has improved business can be counted on with one hand, and each finger is extremely thin.
Everyone always looks to consumer tech but at least where I am at the far more successful and interesting domains are outside of that (and frankly most serious jobs too).
I used to work for a lab doing coral reef sea floor mapping to track reef progression year over year, this was only possible because of recent advances in ml. This is just an example of course.
There is tons of work being done (and successfully used today) in healthcare domains, weather modeling, wireless rf tech, geospatial remote sensing etc etc etc.
My point is AI is being leveraged a lot and is moving forward quickly but the applications for average consumers that are both cost effective and highly useful are growing thinner.
If you want to see consumer tech examples that have been at least moderately successful I think some highlights are Google photos image recognition, current speech to text processing in most places (Apple google amazon), image processing in most smartphone cameras (wrt ml especially night photos) and unfortunately (IMO) a lot of content aggregation algorithms (YouTube, Facebook etc) optimizing for engagement.
Nvidia's DLSS[0] seems to be pretty successful in achieving its goal, which is to allow games to render on lower resolutions without sacrificing too many details.
Google search has gotten worse over the years though. Perhaps that's because the amount of information is growing exponentially. So much of the search results seems spammy these days.
It's still quite smart though. For example, asking a question about a programming problem often brings up the correct stackoverflow page, even if the wording is completely different.