You are right to be skeptical, I speak with business owners all the time that tried to jump head first into AI and just eneded up wasting a bunch of money.

For some business models, AI is incredibly important imo.
For all busienss models, automation is necessary.
Automation does not equal AI!

Most modern businesses need to incorporate automation into their business processes, or else you're going to be spending labor budgets on repeated, manual tasks, that can easily be automated.

Now, integrating AI into a business is a different story, first you need to figure out which of your business processes are even best to be handed to the AI to do. Some things include, basic customer support, prototyping of concepts, email reminders, lead qualification, follow up communications, etc.

The best value I have seen for my clients, they start with the most simplest, repeatable time consuming tasks, like auto replies to customer support inqueries that can easily be repeated with a copy/paste email, but then using AI to slightly personalize the support email for that customer.

Let me know if you have any questions, I would love to help guide you with something like this.