As mentioned in the article, AI is the broader field that encompasses Machine Learning, and to a large extent also Data science (and Computer vision, NLP, Pattern recognition, etc.). And while data science might utilize a lot of statistical techniques, it is a huge stretch to consider the whole AI field to be 'statistics'.

In general, AI borrows many more techniques from mathematics than it does from statistics. However, the field of AI has been quite established since the 1960's, and many techniques have been developed within that field as AI techniques, it's more about being accurate than about being fashionable as AI simply isn't 'just' statistics.