- Uber/Google Maps/Waze: ETA prediction
- Gmail: Smart Compose & spam filtering
- Instagram/Snapchat/Any camera app: Computer vision
- Siri/Google Assistant: Speech-to-text
- FaceID: Facial recognition
- Facebook/Netflix/All content aggregators: Recommendation engines
- Any banking app: Fraud detection
ML's use is extremely widespread at this point. The above list is just a tiny snapshot. "AI" is term thrown around by marketers and hypemen all the time, no arguments there, but ML's usage is anything but niche these days.
I think it will just be another tool available and we'll slowly see it creep into places without making earth shattering improvements. An example that comes to mind is IDE auto-complete that GitHub and others are doing - better than what we had before, but not exactly revolutionary
Apart from within academia and niche places like deepmind, I get the feeling that ML roles and positions will become the new DBA roles of the past - ultimately super-dull jobs where you are just shuffling around storage space, migrating data, or provisioning new tables/models etc without actually adding any business value or getting involved in any of the user-facing work etc.
It is already starting to get heavily commoditized with downloadable pretrained models etc... I see a lot of interns etc who want to come solve cancer with machine learning. I hope that there are not too many youngsters better their career on making it big in machine learning (unless as a researcher) because I genuinely feel like machine learning will just be some library/black box that 99.9% of the time will just be a downloadable pre-trained model that you add like you would if you needed to add OCR support to your product.
I am sure there will be some exciting new things that we'll see of course, but I think they'll be step-wise improvements, rather than huge leaps that open up entirely new worlds of opportunities. E.g. CNNs made image recognition much better (and anyone can now download a really powerful pre-trained model and beat state-of-the-art from just a few years prior etc), but it only made image recognition better - we could do it before, just not as well.
The sales/pr guy wasn't even sure why or not willing to disclose the why. I wonder if it had to do with unions. However that is total speculations based on an experience with gov't and unions approximately 20 years ago where the unionw was very concerned with computer and software I had written taking over union jobs.