In science and engineering you almost never have a "major breakthrough" where some radical change happens over night. Progress is made by slow incremental improvements. Only from a historian's bird-eye view can you make statements like "the steam engine started the industrial revolution". Steam engines existed before James Watt. He just improved them a little to make them commercially viable.

AI in particular suffers from poor definitions. Nothing computers can do is "AI", only the things that are still impossible can be called "AI". Doing arithmetic was once thought to be a sign of intelligence. So was playing Chess, or Go, or recognizing faces. Now that computers can do this easily it is no longer considered difficult.

So while the recent progress with neural networks is likely somewhat overhyped you shouldn't discount the importance of making things commercially viable. In the 90s we had software that could do image recognition, true, but it wasn't accurate enough, general enough, fast enough to be useful in practice. This has changed over the last ten years to the point where image recognition has tons of commercial applications.