On the other hand, there were surely memos like "our facility will be using electric power now. Steam is out". Sometimes execs do set a company's direction.

AI adoption is a bottom-up decision at the level of the individual worker. Converting an entire factory is a top-down decision. No single worker can individually decide to start using electricity instead of steam power, but individuals can choose whether/how to use AI or any other individual-level tool.

That transition took 40-50 years. Electrical power in manufacturing was infeasible for lot of reasons for a longtime.

Any company issuing such an edict early on would have bankrupted themselves. And by the time it became practical, no such edict was needed.

That's a choice individual employees couldn't make. Or, at least, one management wouldn't let them make. It'd require a huge amount of spending.