Machine learning based pattern matching is indeed very useful and profitable when applied correctly. Identify (with confidence levels) features in data that would otherwise take an extremely well trained person. And even then it’s just for the cursory search that takes the longest before presenting the highest confidence candidate results to a person for evaluation. Think: scanning medical data for indicators of cancer, reading live data from machines to predict failure, etc.

And what we call “AI” right now is just a much much more user friendly version of pattern matching - the primary feature of LLMs is that they natively interact with plain language prompts.