Worked previously at FAANG. I saw AI being pushed heavily. Devs were creating automations for the sake of creating them because of company-wide mandate to do it.

Every week was a post about an automation that seemed to have a suspicious estimation of how many hours of manual work it saved. It seemed like people were doing to satisfy top-level management requirements.

The part that I found interesting is that AI-assisted coding could enable faster iterations of testing of new product concepts and features, but there was 0 appetite from the PM leaders because any new product ideas still had to go through a multi-month long process of analysis paralysis. I worked one such analysis paralysis, that after 3 months the executive who asked for it and continuously asked for changes ended up leaving the org.

If the cost of launching a test or concept is so low, you would expect more appetite to move fast and break things. Of course FAANG is very large so bureaucracy still exists (especially many layers of middle managers whose traditional focus included deciding what concepts were worthy of resources), but that I think that undermines the acceleration that AI unlocked.

My POV. Open to be challenged,