If you have an existing rules-based decision-tree system, and you compare its performance with a bunch of other decision trees, and it does better, you are implementing a random forest that happens to be identical to your original system.
If you talk enough all the models and hyperparameters you compared and suchlike that you experimented with, you can probably sufficiently impress people with the talk about the enormous deep learning model you spent several months developing that they won't even remember you mentioning the two-clause Boolean expression that you actually put into production. And of course it's AI. You used k-fold cross validation to select it.
Artificial Intelligence.