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.

▲ asa400 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.

▲ ryandrake 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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?

▲ ambicapter 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

CEOs are ladder climbers. The main skill in ladder climbing is being in tune with what the people around them are thinking, and doing what pleases/maximizes other's approval of the job they are doing.

▲ asa400 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's extremely human behavior. We all do it to some degree or another. The incentives work like this:

    - If all your peers are doing it and you do it and it doesn't work, it's not your fault, because all your peers were doing it too. "Who could have known? Everyone was doing it."
    - If all your peers _aren't_ doing it and you do it and it doesn't work, it's your fault alone, and your board and shareholders crucify you. "You idiot! What were you thinking? You should have just played it safe with our existing revenue streams."

And the one for what's happening with RTO, AI, etc.:

    - If all your peers are doing it and you _don't do it_ and it _works_, your board crucifies you for missing a plainly obvious sea change to the upside. "You idiot! How did you miss this? Everyone else was doing it!"

Non-founder/mercenary C-suites are incentivized to be fundamentally conservative by shareholders and boards. This is not necessarily bad, but sometimes it leads to funny aggregate behavior, like we're seeing now, when a critical mass of participants and/or money passes some arbitrary threshold resulting in a social environment that makes it hard for the remaining participants to sit on the sidelines.

Imagine a CEO going to their board today and going, "we're going to sit out on potentially historic productivity gains because we think everyone else in the United States is full of shit and we know something they don't". The board responds with, "but everything I've seen on CNBC and Bloomberg says we're the only ones not doing this, you're fired".

▲ chung8123 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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teeklp 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree that a lot of the current push is driven by investor sentiment and a degree of FOMO. If capital markets start to believe AI is table stakes, companies don’t really have the option to ignore it anymore. That said, I’m not bearish on AI either. I think there’s a meaningful difference between chasing AI for signaling purposes and deliberately building an “AI muscle” inside the organization. Companies that start learning how to use, govern, and integrate AI thoughtfully are likely to outpace those that never engage at all. From that perspective, most of these memos feel fairly reasonable to me. They’re less about declaring AI as a silver bullet and more about acknowledging that standing still carries its own risk.

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whiplash451 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You might be misreading negative sentiment towards poor leadership as negative sentiment towards AI.

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goatlover 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If AI is the answer, then there's no reason for a top-down mandate like this. People will just start using as they see fit because it helps them do their jobs better, instead of it being forced on them, which doesn't sound much like AI is the answer investors thought it was.

	▲	basket_horse an hour ago \| parent [-]
		No, because as discussed AI also changes the nature of your job in a way that might be negative to a worker, even if it’s more productive. Ie, it may be more fun to ride a horse to your friends house, but it’s not faster than a car. Or as the previous example, it may be more enjoyable to make a shoe by hand, but it’s less productive than using an assembly line

▲ artnoir 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲ steveBK123 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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-t...

▲ 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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▲ collingreen 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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