I don’t know if/when AI will ever become indispensable to normies but it’s clearly making a difference in fields that are highly technical.
The elephant in the room here is that these discussions are still happening at all. In 1999 there was no question of whether the web was going to completely reshape the world, because it already had.
I think we're probably more in the early nineties for AI, rather than the late nineties where everyone (for certain values) is getting some value from it.
The tech is definitely going to have a large impact, but the inherent limitations of it (stochastic and expensive) means that we'll need a bunch of downstream tools and deterministic software to make the most of it.
Which means that a lot of "value" is gonna get vaporised before we reach that point.