Right, "It is difficult get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

I see this sort of irrationality around AI at my workplace, with the owners constantly droning on about "we must use AI everywhere." They are completely and irrationally paranoid that the business will fail or get outpaced by a competitor if we are not "using AI." Keep in mind this is a small 300 employee, non-tech company with no real local competitors.

Asking for clarification or what they mean by "use AI" they have no answers, just "other companies are going to use AI, and we need to use AI or we will fall behind."

There's no strategy or technical merit here, no pre-defined use case people have in mind. Purely driven by hype. We do in fact use AI. I do, the office workers use it daily, but the reality is it has had no outward/visible effect on profitability, so it doesn't show up on the P&L at the end of the quarter except as an expense, and so the hype and mandate continues. The only thing that matters is appearing to "use AI" until the magic box makes the line go up.