That's correct. The problem is they have smart people, tons of money, and several years to figure that out, and the best thing they can come up is a coding agent.
The ‘best’ things are; - fuzzy pattern matching algorithms for traffic analysis, human and other image target recognition.
- targeting algorithms that identify ‘suspicious’ individuals in large volumes of metadata.
- fraud analysis
- antagonistic image and video generation, both for fooling other fraud analysis, but also for propaganda, screwing with other actors, etc.
- directed high speed content generation (text, pictures, video) to spam the ‘algorithm’ and allow near realtime identification of additional buttons to push for given target audiences.
- massive marketing/ad manipulation.
Those budget line items (and the suppliers) really want to stay off the radar however, as it makes their life harder.
Ad/marketing manipulation are exceptionally well done with LLMs in particular.
If you asked someone if drone auto targeting/image recognition or data analysis was ‘AI’, 99% of the time they’ll say yes.