It's also an internal distraction. They'd achieve something much closer to what they promise if they just threw some old-school regression analysis at the problem. But that's not cool these days, plus it's hard to relabel as AI even for the marketroids these days, and would involve actual work :).

This applies to many "AI companies" - so many want to either have easy process (throw data at some random Kaggle model and hope it sticks) or just a buzzword to bullshit investors with. Sometimes both.