One issue in your thinking that needs to be teased out is that not all companies are equal when it comes to AI adoption. You say some companies dive in with an incorrect view of what AI can do - yes and no. The world's largest companies are already deploying AI in every business unit. Indeed, the current power of ML has been driven hugely by the private sector dumping huge sums into programs that, at scale, show the hype is real. Sometimes deploying just one bot for a given process, globally, that turns into millions of dollars in savings, or huge increases in efficiency, etc. I do not agree that these kinds of companies went into AI with anything less than 20/20 vision. Some big businesses certainly struggle to get things out of the lab, but that has more to do with their processes and decision making, very little to do with the AI capabilities themselves.

Looking at smaller businesses, eg $5M revenue with one IT person and no data scientists, sure, they could be lured in by hype. But there are mature off the shelf automations, or as-a-service offerings, that can cater to these organizations as well. The issue for these groups is figuring out what to spend money on and what not to, and the hype could lead them into thinking they are going to moonshot past the competition, when in reality, they just need some basic automations and perhaps new tech investments - data warehousing, retire old tech stack, etc.