The article didn't give the direct response but quoted another speaker at the conference who said "Over the past 50 years, we've lowered the bar for what we consider AI," -Stephan Nusser, senior manager of the User-Focused Systems research group.

Which is long for "not much, but it sounds good".

Maybe they can tack an '-omics' on to the end of it somehow.

The essential defining component of AI to me is an explicit attempt to model or study human cognition/neural processes.

A lot of the learning/search stuff being published is a mix of traditional engineering tools (like Kalman filters, used for decades for state estimation) with some kind of search/learning metaheuristic and does not give a flying hoot about being "intelligent".