It is directing a physical process. The physical process is the changing physical state of the CPU, whatever level you want to get down to, and an artificial intelligence program isn't doing anything different at that level than any other program is doing.
And a human brain is just changing physical and quantum states of the underlying material and isn't doing anything different at that level than any other pile of meat.
I think a human brain is quite a bit different from any other pile of meat. But a computer running an AI versus the computer running TurboTax is the same thing. They're running through the same set of instructions, swapping the same bits of data in and out of memory.
Why is another piece of meat different? It's just the same quarks.
It manifestly is doing different things. Just because you happen to group them all together as an abstraction means nothing particularly interesting physically.
What is a hypothetical conscious program doing differently than a program like TurboTax? I'm talking about on the level of the CPU. I don't know where else consciousness would be located in a computer.