Yeah the push to use AI comes from above, and it's not just in the US. Anyone who's at the top levels of any company now can tell you that the party line is AI positivity and insistence that workers adopt it into their workflows, even if they themselves see little use for it or can find a way to incorporate it into their own workflows yet.

Well, they have a choice of pandering to this one large customer for whom they'll always be the untrusted underdog, or pandering for the larger, more diverse market.

They never managed to become profitable as the untrusted underdog, so the option of keeping doing the same was obvious, I guess.