I think there are also incentives to "sell new things". That's always been the case in search which has had a bazillion trends and "AI related things" as long as I've worked in it. We have massively VC funded vector search companies with armies of tech evangelists pushing a specific point of view right now.

Meanwhile, the amount of manual curation, basic, boring hand-curated taxonomies that actually drive things like "semantic search" at places like Google are simply staggering. Just nobody talks about them much at conferences because they're not very sexy.