If that is accurate and the number is based on 7 days of revenue at about $500 per day average this smells a lot like growth hacking nonsense.
If the interview is to be believed, almost anything you consider "AI-powered" is within one degree of what is happening here. At least on a conceptual level.
AI doesn't need to be magic, it just needs to be making decisions :)
You're stretching the term to the point that it no longer holds any meaning.
There is a valuable distinction in hard AI vs soft AI (hard AI being that whole thinking, emotional maschines thing that we are not really getting closer to, and soft AI being the things that actually generate money because we know how to do them)
[1] A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P, if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E (Tom M. Mitchell, 1997)
Personally I'm a fan of the AI definition "things humans can do and computers can't do yet", but I recognize that that definition isn't terribly useful.
Without making a solid distinction there, people are going to start calling PID temperature controllers "AI"
Is it not a replacement for a guy standing in a room and trying to keep the temperature at the right spot?
I understand that there's "current-generation AI" which is miles beyond this. But closed-loop systems that try to make decisions based off of loop seems very much in the domain of intelligence in the practical sense.
I'm being a bit pedantic here, but the GGP in this thread saying that OP is not AI feels like shifting the goalposts way beyond what we would have said even 5 years ago.
Control systems are not intelligent. It helps to know how they work, and when you do you realize they work on very simple principles.
Intelligence is about learning and applying knowledge, AI is either simulating or synthesizing these behaviors outside of nature. It's not just taking the place of a function that something intelligent does.
AI is more complex and based on Neural Nets, Petri Nets, or alike.
But he is just applying the same logic like every webshop, or advertisement network is doing: you bought X, other people who bought X also liked to buy Y. There is a long way to make AI.
Your definition requires calling the first couple generations of AI research "not AI". And I would most definitely call recommendation engines Artifical Intelligence (what is Google?)
To paraphrase an old quote "AI stops being AI when people start understanding how it works".