Then again, I felt the same way when I studied it at university almost 20 years ago. It was pretty obviously a pipe dream then, too.
I worked at an AI company before, and it was the latter.
If I had to guess what it's been actually used for, I'd wager it's money laundering or counter-terrorism type stuff; it's fairly well suited to finding connections between people and entities given a large data-set, and unlike many ML models, it can tell you why it thinks someone is suspicious, which might be needed for justifying further investigation. This is a completely wild-ass guess though so take with a giant grain of salt.