On what basis do you make that assertion? Other comments have alluded to transfer learning which can be used to take advantage of small datasets, but independent of neural nets, small datasets can be quite suitable to train some useful SVM/linear regression models.
I define small as in small business, as in less than 100k records. I also don't consider a linear regression to be "AI". Things like genetic algorithms and neural networks are probably overkill for an average small business. There's also little evidence to my knowledge that transfer learning is really effective on non-vision applications.
Besides, the fact that you said that linear regressions can be useful for small datasets is exactly my point.
