It’s not yet reached the heights of previous Silicon Valley deities such as the microprocessor, internet browser, or mobile phone. But the valley is banking on A.I. to be its next god and if there is no god, it becomes necessary to invent him.

With potentially tens of millions of jobs in the balance, “A.I.” will become whatever the highest paid lobbying firm convinces our politicians it is.

if A.I. is an umbrella term used interchangeably to mean anything from basic automation to advertising technology

I propose all journalists follow the “Theranos A.I.” test.

The journalists know its bullshit.

About a month after we appeared on the A.I. 100, an analyst from Juniper Research reached out and asked to know more about how we were using “artificial intelligence to transform marketing and reduce ad fraud.” I gave him an in-depth demo of our platform and live customer user cases, walking through each capability without once mentioning A.I. The next week, we were listed in his report as one of the top five companies in A.I. alongside Alphabet, IBM, Facebook and Salesforce.

At first, I thought this was a laughable longshot, but as I started to look at the past year’s winners, a dangerous Neil Patrick Harris “challenge accepted” bubbled up in my head. The rest is history.

However, his company’s “A.I. 100” list is one of the bullshit-industrial complex’s greatest art forms.

The investors know it’s bullshit.

In press releases, Feedvisor, a price analysis tool for brands who sell on Amazon, markets itself as the “artificial-intelligence, machine-learning, big-data company.” This is comically full of buzzwords, but for the purpose of SEO and lower-tier press, I imagine it is pretty effective.

Welcome to the artificial intelligence bullshit-industrial complex.

Apparently, it is also what passes for artificial intelligence these days.

None of this will be due to artificial intelligence. Yet in my two years at the startup, reporters, analysts, and sometimes even customers seemed determined to call us an A.I. company.