Yes, AI (or even better what I like to call Artificial Stupidity - naive implementations that get you 90% there) are a great cognitive prosthetic, but in my experience should not be relied on.
Sarcasm aside, your definition is too low-level, as if we called brains just braincells. Pattern recognition is a building block of AI like a logic gate is a building block of a CPU.
We don't understand brains or braincells - how many operations per cecond can a braincell do? What type of operations? How many bytes does it store? We don't know.
Can we replace a single braincell with a chip and get them to act the same?
AI is not a single network usually, it is a pipeline of networks of different kinds, see e.g. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IcaBn3ej0 (seek to 1:35 for beginning of an architecture overview). You can’t call it “just pattern matching” without fetching it too far.
Have you considered all uses of AI or just a few that you encountered in your experience? AI automates lots of unpleasant manual work.
Github Copilot is a great example of this IMO. When you're writing code it seems to be on a 90/10 of 80/20 split where 10-20% of your code is the actual important bits that you have to pay attention to and the other 80-90% is all the common patterns, components and conventions around the important code.
AI is fantastic for the 80-90% of that code that I really don't care about. I can focus my energy on the 10-20% of the code that is really important and let the AI code the other 80-90% that is mostly glue and filler.