I think it’s more simple than you assume. From my limited experience (many stranger’s anecdotes and my team recently being fired literally because “the other (very different) production location is able to do it without a dedicated Quality Management team”) most employers / company chiefs just want to make more money or, at least, increase the perceived value so that being bought out becomes realistic and leaves them with more money. They don’t actually care if their product works well or efficient, as long as number go up. Maybe the original company founder does but how many companies are still there that have the founder for long-term in key decision making and without shareholders who kinda hold the real power and couldn’t care less if the company cleaned up oceans or burned children because to them it’s just one combination of letters that make them money?
As @lvxferre@mander.xyz suggested, the top management might not even understand that AI won’t help, so they think it will make a short- (savings due to firings) and long-term (increased efficiency or otherwise better product) profit. And those that are very informed about AI understand, at the very least, that they can increase short-term profits by firing employees (thus saving on needing to pay salaries to pesky humans) under the guise of increasing efficiency.
So to top management it’s just a decision of “do I want more money now and in the future?” or “do I want more money now and maybe also trick idiots into buying us out before it goes belly-up?”
Lastly, I think you might ascribe more self-reflection ability to middle management than they have. I want to believe that most of them truly think they are a crucial part of making the company work, so they don’t even see that replacing humans with AI would make them obsolete and thus prone for firing.
I would love for it to be different, but they’re mostly right.
The hardcore shareholders, who probably have shares in more than one company and for sure only see these companies for their monetary value and nothing more, would not care if the company’s creative work featured AI giveaways like twelve-fingered people occasionally and inconsistent storylines, if it would mean they could save on all their artists salary by paying only for one AI subscription.
Yes, you can still tell (mostly) when something’s made by AI, but the fact is that we already do see creatives being replaced with AI, leaving them free to do dishes and laundry instead of the other way around. The Coca Cola AI ads are one prominent example. Executives and shareholders don’t care about their product being inferior if it means it saves them even 20% in expenses. And we both know that replacing all your creative team (often even just one or two) with AI is a bigger saving on “Creative expenses” than just 20%. We know that because we can literally look up salaries vs subscription price for stuff like Sora and Veo3.
Yet, contrary to what I perceive as your main argument here, we don’t see widespread adoption of AI in all kinds of companies to do the tedious labor. That seems to still be done often either by traditional methods, because LLMs and generative AI is just not good at repairing a leak in toilets or checking for damages in a factory or welding or even just pushing a button to announce break-time.
Edit: spellings