The last time I was at a start up (~2 years ago), it was a running joke that the easiest way to raise money was to say your product had something to do with AI.

The last time I was at a start up (~2 years ago), it was a running joke that the easiest way to raise money was to say your product had something to do with AI. We saw so many companies that were branding everything as AI simply to raise a round. One of the funniest cases was a start up that claimed to be using AI to process their customers' requests but was actually just farming out the work to contractors who were doing everything by hand.