To be fair, that’s not exactly a new thing, it’s just sensitive to the exact phase of the Great AI Freeze/Thaw Cycle. A lot of now-ordinary automation used to be "AI" until it become commonplace and no longer buzzword-worthy and thus no longer regarded as "AI", and/or an AI winter hit.

Last time that AI was big before DL it was the "big data" fad and everything had to be big data. Marketing has never not been about how to disguise "what we already do" as the newest buzzword that customers (or investors) want to hear.

The same goes, of course, for all the non-AI fads like "the cloud" or "NoSQL".

Oracle is the hilarious version of this -

9i - "internet"

10g - "grid"

11g - "also grid"

12c - "cloud"

26ai - "ai"

various other examples. One really annoying thing is this has also happened in open source projects too - generic things that, sure, help out with AI tasks are now "AI" things.

Fun times. Although I find it hard to blame them tbh.

They’re incentived to do so because apparently investors don’t understand the difference.

Remember when crypto was hot and everything had crypto.

Remember the Internet was first hot and everything was iThis or Active That. iPhone still has i.

Remember… well not, me, I wasn’t alive… when radiation was cool and Radioactive was in.

Everyone always wants to be cool.

Yup. Also ML is called AI now too at least as far as hiring managers are concerned. Adjust your resume accordingly.

BPM is now agentic, don’t you know.

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