But does crazy speedup of tasks actually yield more productivity? Or does it yield greater numbers of pointless tasks?

Anecdotally, I've seen management using AI to produce more and more flashy looking dashboards and interactive displays of various metrics. Will this help our bottom line?

If management spends their idle time building dashboards by themselves instead of taking up developer time asking for dashboards to be built and populated for them, there might be productivity to be had...