Isn’t most AI work in research though? I think the problem most are having with this is we generally consider AI to be more prestigious than something like data science (which seems like it would be a better name for a degree in its own right).
AI is a broad field. Much of it is applied these days.
Even setting a very high bar for what constitutes "AI", I would concede that Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, and Cortana are AI systems. How many jobs are there supporting those products today? How many will there be 5 years from now when these kids graduate?
But there are many other AI products out there, and moreso, machine learning is now widespread as a supporting tool in very many places. The data science field of today/tomorrow is ML and AI, and we definitely will need more practitioners.
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.
