Your decade of experience doesn't support your projection. 10 years ago, AI didn't show a clear path toward meaningful products either. IMO product innovation isn't on a curve, it's a staircase.
That's not entirely correct. It's just that, as techniques become mainstream, they tend to fall out of what's considered to be "AI". As an example, speech recognition used to be firmly in the AI camp. Now that it is commonplace, it is only ever mentioned in the AI context if it is paired with ML. Regardless, there are lots of useful products using that technology. Same goes for many others.