I feel like this is inevitable with any new tech. Social media, cryptocurrency, instant messaging, the Internet itself. ML is the new kid that people want to use any way possible to make money, until they realize as you said it can only help in so many situations.

More often than not a nice sql query and some programming gets the job done.

I don’t think it’ll stay this way forever, just a lot of annoying hype atm, but I don’t fault the technology itself for that.

I actually did an ML project at my job, much to my chagrin, to develop a chat app that lets us ask questions about our product.

It actually turned out really cool and was dead simple to implement. Now our employees (customer service team esp) can ask questions with a “trust but verify” approach to solve customer problems and surface information quickly. Saves a lot of time otherwise spent sifting thru documentation and support articles.