Optical sorting of fruit and various other things is a great example where early AI techniques made significant real world progress. It’s not sexy by today’s standards, but is it’s based on a lot of early image classification work.

We are talking about money-making applications here. Not progress.

By progress I mean actual money making products. If your widget is doing shape recognition based on training sets and your competitors are hard coding color recognition then you end up making more money.

Spam filtering and route-planning are big successes from previous generations of techniques labelled as "AI".