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This is absolutely the norm across corporate America right now. Chief AI Czars enforcing AI usage metrics with mandatory AI training for anyone that isn't compl

This is absolutely the norm across corporate America right now. Chief AI Czars enforcing AI usage metrics with mandatory AI training for anyone that isn't complying. People with roles nowhere near software/tech/data are being asked about their AI usage in their self-assessment/annual review process, etc. It's deeply fascinating psychologically and I'm not sure where this ends. I've never seen any tech theme pushed top down so hard in 20+ years working. The closest was the early 00s offshoring boom before it peaked and was rationalized/rolled back to some degree. The common theme is C-suite thinks it will save money and their competitors already figured out out, so they are FOMOing at the mouth about catching up on the savings.

collingreen 9mo ago
> FOMOing at the mouth This is a great line - evocative, funny, and a bit o wordplay. I think you might be right about the behavior here; I haven't been able to otherwise understand the absolute forcing through of "use AI!!" by people and upon people with only a hazy notion of why and how. I suppose it's some version of nuclear deterrence or Pascal's wager -- if AI isn't a magic bullet then no big loss but if it is they can't afford not to be the first one to fire it.
- steveBK123 9mo ago
  I think one thing that I noticed this week in terms of "eye of the beholder" view on AI was the Goldman press release. Apparently Anthropic has been in there for 6 months helping them with some back office streamlining and the outcome of that so far has been.. a press release announcing that they are working on it! A cynic might also ask if this is simply PR for Goldman to get Anthropic's IPO mandate. I think people underestimate the size/scope/complexity of big company tech stacks and what any sort of AI transformation may actually take. It may turn into another cottage industry like big data / cloud / whatever adoption where "forward deployed / customer success engineers" are collocated by the 1000s for years at a time in order to move the needle.
hnthrow0287345 9mo ago
At least they are consistently applying this to all roles instead of only making tech roles suffer through it like they do with interview processes
ryandrake 9mo ago
I don't understand how all these companies issue these sorts of policies in lock-step with each other. The same happened with "Return To Office". All of a sudden every company decided to kill work from home within the same week or so. Is there some secret CEO cabal that meets on a remote island somewhere to coordinate what they're going to all make workers do next?
- steveBK123 9mo ago
  > Is there some secret CEO cabal that meets on a remote island somewhere I mean.. recent FBI files of certain emails would imply.. probably, yes.
  - strange_quark 9mo ago
    Probably yes? Definitely. See also articles like this one [1]. These guys all run in the same circles and the groupthink gets out of control. https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t...
- artnoir 9mo ago
  I have wondered the exact same thing. It's uncanny how in-sync they all are. I can only suppose that the trend trickles down from the same few influential sources.
- chung8123 9mo ago
  It is investor sentiment and FOMO. If your investors feel like AI is the answer you will need to start using AI. I am not as negative on AI as the rest of the group here though. I think AI first companies will out pace companies that never start to learn the AI muscle. From my prospective these memos mostly seem reasonable.
  - whiplash451 9mo ago
    You might be misreading negative sentiment towards poor leadership as negative sentiment towards AI.
asa400 9mo ago
> I've never seen any tech theme pushed top down so hard in 20+ years working. > The common theme is C-suite thinks it will save money and their competitors already figured out out, so they are FOMOing at the mouth about catching up on the savings. I concur 100%. This is a monkey-see-monkey-do FOMO mania, and it's driven by the C-suite, not rank-and-file. I've never seen anything like it. Other sticky "productivity movements" - or, if you're less generous like me, fads - at the level of the individual and the team, for example agile development methodologies or object oriented programming or test driven development, have generally been invented and promoted by the rank and file or by middle management. They may or may not have had some level of industry astroturfing to them (see: agile), but to me the crucial difference is that they were mostly pushed by a vanguard of practitioners who were at most one level removed from the coal face. Now, this is not to say there aren't developers and non-developer workers out there using this stuff with great effectiveness and singing its praises. That _is_ happening. But they're not at the leading edge of it mandating company-wide adoption. What we are seeing now is, to a first approximation, the result of herd behavior at the C-level. It should be incredibly concerning to all of us that such a small group of lemming-like people should have such an enormously outsized role in both allocating capital and running our lives.
- agentultra 9mo ago
  And telling us how to do our jobs. As if they've ever compared the optimized output of clang and gcc on an example program to track down a performance regression at 2AM.

collingreen 9mo ago

> FOMOing at the mouth This is a great line - evocative, funny, and a bit o wordplay. I think you might be right about the behavior here; I haven't been able to otherwise understand the absolute forcing through of "use AI!!" by people and upon people with only a hazy notion of why and how. I suppose it's some version of nuclear deterrence or Pascal's wager -- if AI isn't a magic bullet then no big loss but if it is they can't afford not to be the first one to fire it.

steveBK123 9mo ago
I think one thing that I noticed this week in terms of "eye of the beholder" view on AI was the Goldman press release. Apparently Anthropic has been in there for 6 months helping them with some back office streamlining and the outcome of that so far has been.. a press release announcing that they are working on it! A cynic might also ask if this is simply PR for Goldman to get Anthropic's IPO mandate. I think people underestimate the size/scope/complexity of big company tech stacks and what any sort of AI transformation may actually take. It may turn into another cottage industry like big data / cloud / whatever adoption where "forward deployed / customer success engineers" are collocated by the 1000s for years at a time in order to move the needle.

hnthrow0287345 9mo ago

At least they are consistently applying this to all roles instead of only making tech roles suffer through it like they do with interview processes

ryandrake 9mo ago

I don't understand how all these companies issue these sorts of policies in lock-step with each other. The same happened with "Return To Office". All of a sudden every company decided to kill work from home within the same week or so. Is there some secret CEO cabal that meets on a remote island somewhere to coordinate what they're going to all make workers do next?

steveBK123 9mo ago
> Is there some secret CEO cabal that meets on a remote island somewhere I mean.. recent FBI files of certain emails would imply.. probably, yes.
- strange_quark 9mo ago
  Probably yes? Definitely. See also articles like this one [1]. These guys all run in the same circles and the groupthink gets out of control. https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t...
artnoir 9mo ago
I have wondered the exact same thing. It's uncanny how in-sync they all are. I can only suppose that the trend trickles down from the same few influential sources.
chung8123 9mo ago
It is investor sentiment and FOMO. If your investors feel like AI is the answer you will need to start using AI. I am not as negative on AI as the rest of the group here though. I think AI first companies will out pace companies that never start to learn the AI muscle. From my prospective these memos mostly seem reasonable.
- whiplash451 9mo ago
  You might be misreading negative sentiment towards poor leadership as negative sentiment towards AI.

asa400 9mo ago

> I've never seen any tech theme pushed top down so hard in 20+ years working. > The common theme is C-suite thinks it will save money and their competitors already figured out out, so they are FOMOing at the mouth about catching up on the savings. I concur 100%. This is a monkey-see-monkey-do FOMO mania, and it's driven by the C-suite, not rank-and-file. I've never seen anything like it. Other sticky "productivity movements" - or, if you're less generous like me, fads - at the level of the individual and the team, for example agile development methodologies or object oriented programming or test driven development, have generally been invented and promoted by the rank and file or by middle management. They may or may not have had some level of industry astroturfing to them (see: agile), but to me the crucial difference is that they were mostly pushed by a vanguard of practitioners who were at most one level removed from the coal face. Now, this is not to say there aren't developers and non-developer workers out there using this stuff with great effectiveness and singing its praises. That _is_ happening. But they're not at the leading edge of it mandating company-wide adoption. What we are seeing now is, to a first approximation, the result of herd behavior at the C-level. It should be incredibly concerning to all of us that such a small group of lemming-like people should have such an enormously outsized role in both allocating capital and running our lives.

agentultra 9mo ago
And telling us how to do our jobs. As if they've ever compared the optimized output of clang and gcc on an example program to track down a performance regression at 2AM.