Not sure if this is the best community to post in; please let me know if there's a more appropriate one. AFAIK Aii@programming.dev is meant for news and articles only.
AI is a super broad field that encompasses so many tech. It is not limited to the whatever the tech CEOs are pushing.
In this comment section alone, we see a couple examples of AI used in practical ways.
On a more personal level, surely you'd have played video games before? If you had to face any monster / bot opponents / etc, those are all considered AI. Depending on the game, stages / maps / environments may be procedurally generated - using AI techniques!
There are many more examples - e.g. pathfinding in map apps, translation apps -, just that we are all so familiar with them that we stopped thinking of them as AI.
So there are plenty of evidence for AI's usefulness.