You could look at four possibilities of: innovative business vs innovative AI - something with neither is probably what you want to avoid, as in yet-another-whatever, that claims to use "AI" for something that doesn't really change anything. If they business model is cool (which you should be able to have an opinion on as a layperson) then it could still be interesting even if AI is just a nice to have. And if they're doing cool AI stuff, as in research, like OpenAi or something, but the business model is not super clear, that could be cool too. In that case, expect leadership with phds and publication records, and a company track record of publishing or funding research, not just commercialization activities.

I'd also add, maybe controversially, that anyone using "AI" to make some kind of basic prediction (say for personalization, demand planning, medical decisions, really most tabular data) is not going to have a business that lives or dies based on AI. Not saying it's BS, but it's undifferentiated from standard models for those things, so saying they use AI is more marketing.

Look for computer vision, nlp, reinforcement learning, or similar if you want AI to be a differentiator. And be careful with anyone doing "smart search" type stuff, its BS without strong evidence to the contrary.