Possibly dumb question, could the “difficulty” problem used in POW mining be modified to serve a dual purpose?

I was just watching Bloomberg and they were talking about how massive the demand for energy will be for the future of AI. At first I found it funny how much different energy usage for AI is viewed compared to the way crypto mining was viewed just a few years ago. Then I started thinking about how they will compete with each other for energy demands but then I wondered if they could somehow be combined. I know it's more complicated than that but basically POW is now solving a useless problem and at the same time AI has a very useful problem it needs to solve but no real demand to solve it independently