Every vendor I meet says their product is powered by AI and I have stopped believing any of them, how do I tell what is real?

I am a CFO at a mid-size company. In the last twelve months I have sat through probably thirty vendor pitches where AI was the central selling point. The problem is that the term seems to cover everything from a basic rule-based filter to something genuinely sophisticated. I cannot tell the difference from a sales presentation and I suspect the vendors know that.

Last quarter we paid a significant amount for a tool that was marketed heavily as AI-powered. When we got into implementation the technical team told us it was essentially a decision tree with some keyword matching. There was nothing wrong with the tool for our use case but it was not what was described.

What questions should someone in a buying position actually ask to cut through the AI marketing language and understand what a product is really doing? Is there a practical framework for this or does it require technical expertise I do not have?