Are people's bosses making them use AI tools?

LLMs are the first technology I've experienced where there's a lot of top-down pressure to adopt it ASAP. Most other technologies in my career, like VCS or static analysis or whatever else were championed by colleagues or peers.

It's all about the story that's sold to the higher ups. The higher you go up the corporate ladder, the vaguer the understanding of the technology. The big boss hears from a Microsoft salesman that AI = you can fire 20% of your workforce, but never questions exactly how that works. They probably never got sold static analysis in that way. That was just some kind of tool that somehow helps with that mumbo jumbo that developers spend all day typing. There's no story there that inspires a manager. AI = cut costs is music to the ears of the board. So then pressure gets applied to those lower down.

Something similar was going on with cloud a few years ago. The story was if you get cloud you can get rid of those expensive infrastructure people and it will all be so much more reliable. So the big boss gets a cloud strategy and foists it on those lower down. There's also pressure to be an on-trend boss. If all the other boss' are getting into it, then you need to as well.