AI is not a buzzword, try beating Go without machine learning. Just ignore the whole enterprise speak, and you'll see a lot of really cool things which are possible almost only by means of neural nets.
Neural nets is a useful term that refers to a class of algorithms, though. "AI" doesn't appear to have any use beyond marketing to people who don't know what they want.
Genuinely curious what you mean by "beating Go". Do you mean "beating exceptional human Go players"?
Almost every technology buzzword is based on something interesting and useful that then gets used in as many unsuitable applications as possible.