Real world applications for AI?

Can anyone share their experiences with using AI (I'm thinking approaches presented in "AI: A Modern Approach" by Russell and Norvig) outside academia?

Except for the obvious case of NLP, I'm affraid that the, admittedly fascinating, stuff presented in the book can be hard to use in practice due to difficulties in assembling the "body of knowledge" (as a belief network, or first order logic predicates) for a given domain.

Compared to the thriving fields of NLP or CV (Computer Vision), these more abstract approaches seem (at least to an outsider) to be lagging behind in industry adoption.