I'm sorry to say this, but the company does not need employees to respond enthusiastically. They'll just replace the people who resist for too long. Employees who resist indefinitely have absolutely zero leverage unless they're working on a small subset of services or technologies where AI coding agents will never be useful (which rules out the vast majority of employed software developers).

Oh, they can certainly do that (in part evidenced by companies doing that). It's a large cost to the company, you'll get attrition and lose a lot of employee good-will, and it'll only pay off if you're right. Going with an optional system by making such tools available and incentivizing their use will dodge both of those issues and let you pivot if the technology isn't as beneficial as you thought.