There had to have been a trigger that caused the shift, even if that trigger was a momentum threshold...which had to manifest as signal.

What didn't happen was irrational and self-oblivious leadership noticing they had been acting irrationally for years. "the potential" of wealth or power was present long before this shift.

You might overestimate the understanding of people outside the tech bubble. Most don't understand or believe what LLMs can do, and humans have a unavoidable habit of sticking their heads in the sand about disruptive change .

That is especially true in a large, heavily bureaucratic organization with a culture of highly-centralized top-down decision-making by the boss - an 80 year-old, non-technical boss - and which priortizes loyalty to and pleasing the boss over expertise and speaking the truth.