There are two sides to this -- AI used a marketing buzzword to attract customers and AI used as a buzzword to attract investors. For the customers, they need t

There are two sides to this -- AI used a marketing buzzword to attract customers and AI used as a buzzword to attract investors. For the customers, they need to be sure that the company is actually capable of solving the problem they are claiming to solve (before signing some sort of long term contract that doesn't actually make the claims the sales people put forward.) The customer's evaluation, however is distinct from that of an investors. It is the job of an investor to determine if the startup is actually capable of having reasonable odds of successfully pursuing whatever they are claiming to be doing. If an investor is not, then for an actual startup doing machine learning, probably this is not they type of investor you want. During the ICO pump and dump cycle one thing stuck out to me - nearly all of the ICOs were being run by people without any cryptography experience. Most had little to no software development experience. I'd suggest investors take their first step in evaluating "AI" startups similarly.