I don’t remember AI being used as a widespread marketing term until 2-3 years ago. Before that it was just more of a vague tech thing you’d sometimes see, but now every single app seems to have reframed their business to be about AI agents.
Early 2010s had a lot of neural networks AI stuff going on and it certainly became a minor hype cycle as well though that kind of resulted in the current LLM wave.
There was also a small chatbot bubble around 2014-2016 (Microsoft Tay kinda blew it out of the water, and it never recovered), though companies did seem a bit skittish about using the term 'AI' at that point.
