Might be a bad analogy, because early chess computers were purely algorithmic and worked despite their poor board state evaluation heuristics that humans used to be able to augment.

Compare with go (boardgame): Centaur go was basically not ever a thing.

Other applications behaved kinda similarly (AI Starcraft/Dota/...), where we had decent "human-like" heuristics from the get go and the Centaur concept could never really shine, much less for a decade or more.

I'd also like to stress that past progress in this mainly happened for the love of the game, while the (economical) incentives to replace human office workers are... high.