Of course, "these days" (scine ~2014 by my reckoning) AI is synonymous with Deep Learning (in the lay press anyway) but there are actually other techniques still being researched, specifically theory- and knowledge-driven techniques, from the field of symbolic machine learning.

Such techniques have long been used in medicine and biology with great success, very notably in the example of the Robot Scientist, a system that automates the scientific process end-to-end, in a biology context.

This is from the abstract of the Nature paper, from January 2004 [1]:

  The question of whether it is possible to automate the scientific process is of both great theoretical 
  interest1,2 and increasing practical importance because, in many scientific areas, data are being generated much 
  faster than they can be effectively analysed. We describe a physically implemented robotic system that applies 
  techniques from artificial intelligence3,4,5,6,7,8 to carry out cycles of scientific experimentation. The system 
  automatically originates hypotheses to explain observations, devises experiments to test these hypotheses, 
  physically runs the experiments using a laboratory robot, interprets the results to falsify hypotheses 
  inconsistent with the data, and then repeats the cycle. Here we apply the system to the determination of gene 
  function using deletion mutants of yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and auxotrophic growth experiments9. We built 
  and tested a detailed logical model (involving genes, proteins and metabolites) of the aromatic amino acid 
  synthesis pathway. In biological experiments that automatically reconstruct parts of this model, we show that an 
  intelligent experiment selection strategy is competitive with human performance and significantly outperforms, 
  with a cost decrease of 3-fold and 100-fold (respectively), both cheapest and random-experiment selection.

There's more info and especially links in the Wikipedia article [2].

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[1] Functional genomic hypothesis generation and experimentation by a robot scientist, https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02236

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Scientist