You're being facetious, but it probably should be. AI+combinatorial optimization seems like an underexplored research area IMO. These solvers assume a lot of deterministic / constant penalties that are in reality stochastic - if you want a system that optimizes both efficiency _and_ robustness, some kind of AI+optimization thing seems very interesting.
This is certainly an active area of research. When I saw the article, I actually assumed that Google was announcing progress in AI4CO and was surprised that the article stuck to fairly orthodox techniques.
