I asked five people to explain AI to me and got five completely different answers, so which one is right?

My manager keeps saying we need to "embrace AI" in our workflow. My brother says it is going to end humanity. My colleague uses it every day and says it is just autocomplete. A YouTuber I watched said it is the most important invention since electricity. I genuinely do not know what to believe because every explanation I find either dumbs it down to uselessness or goes straight into neural networks and training data.

Can someone give me a grounded, honest explanation of what AI actually is? Not a textbook definition, not hype. What is it, what can it actually do right now, and what is it not? I just want to be able to hold an intelligent conversation about it without feeling like I am missing something obvious.