You're missing the possibility of AI having gotten too big to fail.
If too many careers are tied to AI succeeding, accepting its failure is no longer an option for the company. It if far more attractive to keep shoveling it into more and more places in a desperate attempt to find a use case than to accept you've wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on a hype.
Combine this with AI being used in places where quality is highly subjective and not directly tied to the KPIs business people care about (like Google Search summaries, where the actual product is eyeballs on ads), and we might be stuck with it despite a lack of usefulness.
If AI features are costing hundreds of millions of dollars and not providing any value, then it is a great opportunity to begin a competing company and sell a cleaner, cheaper, better product.
If too many careers are tied to AI succeeding, accepting its failure is no longer an option for the company. It if far more attractive to keep shoveling it into more and more places in a desperate attempt to find a use case than to accept you've wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on a hype.
Combine this with AI being used in places where quality is highly subjective and not directly tied to the KPIs business people care about (like Google Search summaries, where the actual product is eyeballs on ads), and we might be stuck with it despite a lack of usefulness.