Fun fact, I once worked in just such an IT back office for a pharma. But you're right of course, for them this stuff isn't the product, it's just a infrastructu

Fun fact, I once worked in just such an IT back office for a pharma. But you're right of course, for them this stuff isn't the product, it's just a infrastructure needed to be able to keep people focused on building the product. I don't follow the logic that undermining that infrastructure is therefore harmless. Stop keeping the lights turned on regularly, and your researchers are unlikely to keep showing up to their jobs. Stop maintaining the IT infra and eventually it will be kludge that makes people hate using it. Stop supporting HR and eventually when your employees need HR they won't trust HR. In any company all the employees know there are two sets of values at play. There's the declared values, which get printed up with nice graphic design, and then there's what the company actually incentivizes and shows that it cares about through its actions. Show through your actions that you don't care (despite saying you do) and people will get the message you say you aren't sending. With these kinds of change-ups the message is "if AI isn't the solution, then you're the problem"