In eldritch times there was another AI hausse wave. Back then they also managed to trick themselves into believing that logic gates can be taught to think and that natural language processing could become the superior computer interface.

Lots of money went into it, the military was onboard, Japan was going to teach cats and spoons to write Prolog*.

After some time very little of this actually came to be. Now it didn't go away, quite the opposite, but the inheritance from that AI wave is things like scoring credit applications. Every bank does it now, and have for decades. They run rule engines that consume information from applicant and other sources and price the credit automatically. I suspect this is the biggest contribution from that old AI stuff that's still around.

And pretty much no one predicted it, everyone involved was chasing something else.

The doped up vector databases on a loop will most likely have a similar trajectory. I think some of them will end up as ERP RAD stuff, expensive consultant intensive SAP and Salesforce style products. Some will probably live on as disability tooling.

* https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.php/aimagazine/article...