What would you categorize as shiny in this case? "spam detection, image labeling, event parsing, text classification" can be implemented in lots of ways, simple and shiny as well.

Either way I don't think it matters too much because people can't really tell simple from shiny as long as the buzzword bullet points are there.

The point is rather that the job of the data science team is to deliver prestige to the manager, not to deliver data science solutions to actual practical problems. It's enough if they work on toy data and show "promising results" and can have percentages, impressive serious charts and numbers on the powerpoint slides.

I've heard from many data scientists in such situations that they don't get any input on what they should actually do, so they make up their own questions and own tasks to model, which often has nothing to do with actual business value, but they toy around with their models, produce accuracy percentages and that's enough.