I'd wager less than 1% of businesses outside of SV even have a clue where to begin, or what to use it for, my employer included. "Do we hire some AI guys?"
We'll need to crack the 1%-using-it mark for me to consider the revolution "begun"...
I also think you would be surprised at how many businesses both do, and really want and value, software - but don't have anyone convincing to do it for them
A random example: my SO often works with high-res photos of their products, and sometimes this involves modifying them to suit the random requirements of other businesses. Something I currently solve for her by running ImageMagick one-liners if she needs more than a few photos modified. A person with basic familiarity of shell scripting and CLI tools could improve their workflow and keep improving it on-demand, as the requirements change.
Without that, working as a programmer in such disorganized team, you will mostly spend your time working "against" them. It's like you are trying to glue things together and people will just go and and rip those glued together things apart constantly.
Unless you have some sort of evidence supporting your claim, I guess we'll never know how surprised I would be by the reality you're describing.
Business people make no sense.
Me: "It's finished, here are the areas of strength and weakness, and here's where we can deploy the system for maximum effectiveness."
Business: "We're thinking about the best way to deploy this."
Me: "This is how you deploy it."
Business: "We'll think about and get back to you. Don't do anything until we tell you."
Me: "..."
Business: "..."
2. Data entry. We took a picture of this customer's utility bill / bank statement / receipt / whatever. Now do we give it to human to identify relevant fields and manually type them into a spreadsheet, or do we have a computer automatically extract the business-relevant data? Or, heck, maybe that's too complex, but can we at least have a computer help--automatically filter out bad images, do perspective correction, highlight areas of interest, etc.? (This sort of thing is actually used in, e.g., digitizing census records; we don't trust handwriting OCR to be good enough on its own, but we trust it to automatically highlight relevant fields, in order, and provide a first-draft guess at the transcription to assist the human transcribers).
I could probably come up with a few more if I thought about it for a while, but those are the areas I've actually worked on recently.
My employer does supply chain optimization, because many "average" businesses have supply chains that need to be optimized. We have specialized AI tools based on deep learning and differential programming, and we have human supply chain experts that can fit those tools to the specifics of a customer's situation.
I would say that despite our best marketing efforts, many of our customers don't know that we're doing this "AI" thing they've been hearing about.
The anti-pattern with "Do we hire some AI guys?" is that, if you have to teach those guys how a supply chain works, you've already lost. Pick someone who is already specialized in the problem you're trying to solve.
Does the AI which can help with literally everything a business does exist? That sounds rather general purpose and extremely open-ended.
this article by evan miller does a good job of explaining why: https://www.evanmiller.org/predictive-analytics.html