technology

Some are true believers but a lot of it is the C-suite culture of adopting the latest and greatest so you can go to the same meetings and be seen as "with it" and be a very acquirable company. These are people who were already throwing piles of cash at contractors and software that didn't really solve productivity problems but were very hip among others in their class and among the class they hope to be in - higher echelons of bourgeois. "Oh you're not on Salesforce? You've gotta get it! Everyone's doing so much better using it." Then moving to Salesforce ends up making nothing particularly better but does eat up literally an entire year's worth of wages and opportunity cost. The person who made that decision only fails upwards because everyone that will make any decisions about their career believes they made the company more marketable.

AI is just that plus you can treat it like a manager treats a worker: ask for the thing to be done without providing any real guidance or metrics by which it would be considered complete. Then "AI" presents some garbage and lies about how great it is and the manager can't tell you it's wrong because (1) they don't understand it anyways and (2) they see their own career value increase if the bullshitting machine is perceived as working. To management, this is no different from incompetently running a failing department that can't produce anything worthwhile: spin it as wildly successful because delivering the product barely matters in most situations.