It's a bit of a harsh heuristic, but after working now on several projects involving ML/AI and reading and watching about the experience of others in the indust

It's a bit of a harsh heuristic, but after working now on several projects involving ML/AI and reading and watching about the experience of others in the industry too, I've come to associate most claims of ML as snake oil. In industry today, I believe very few businesses are reaping much benefit from ML as compared to trivial statistical/analytical tools (linear regression, most popular recommenders, common sense improvements/optimizations, etc.). The only real benefit I would argue ML has brought for businesses has been in marketing to the general lay audience and misleading investors. The main reason for this in my opinion is you can't really just come in and make recommendations/improvements to a given problem domain without deeply understanding that domain back to front - and that's an understanding that academic types that get hired to build ML systems almost never have. You can't stand at an arms length from real business problems and just throw maths at them and expect to make good (or even sensible) recommendations.