I think I agree with you that the degree might be more aptly named "data science", but that's a relatively minor detail in the scheme of things.

I don't think I would claim most AI work is research, but regardless, I think there is a still quite a lot of work that is quite applied nowadays. For example, there are a huge number of special-use-case neural networks you can think of to make very specific decisions based on image data. Or, nearly every online retailer would love someone to be able to come up with a good recommendation engine for products on their site. While a PhD might build a slightly-better one, I'm fairly confident that an undergrad trained properly (no pun intended) could pull off something usable.