The snake oil part of it is also a huge industry. A simple statistical algorithm or set of heuristics can be sold for much more if you can pass it off as sophisticated ML.
For example, you don’t see too many of the most successful or long-term quant finance products touting machine learning or AI. They do use these techniques (sometimes directly for trading, sometimes only for auxiliary problems), but don’t make a big deal out of it.
I worked previously in both adtech & quant finance, and have seen products where ML is the absolute core of the whole thing, yet it wasn’t marketed that way (even recently). I’ve also seen products fail to gain market traction due to overly aggressive ML/AI branding that customers (mostly other enterprise business marketing teams) found alienating and overly complex.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3321138/did-ibm-put-to...
IBM is going around selling this to corporations and agencies as a solution to pretty much everything that involves data analysis.