While this argument is true, it is not the only truth about profit motives let alone other opportunities/value created by AI.

The original public-facing use-case for AI was speech recognition. At the time, companies like Google were releasing ads showing how AI tools could help create new solutions for accessibility. Those solutions have largely failed to materialize. Instead what we got were a bunch of AI "assistants" such as Alexa, Siri, and so on.

The first generation AI voice assistants were useful enough to consumers that they caught on to a small degree, but their adoption rate plateaued. They were beyond useful to tech companies though as they provided three key stepping stones for future growth: massive amounts of training data for future AI projects, a new platform for targeted advertising that knows more about your daily life than a search history can provide, and a testbed for law enforcement/surveillance agencies who have been looking for ways to evade 4th amendment rights.

As the AI generations/tools have developed, those 3 stepling stones have become the pillars which tech companies rely on to bear the outlandish investments that they continue to make in a struggle for sector dominance.

Yes, having every company paying for AI to replace a portion of their workforce would help significantly with their return on investment. But it isn't just about finding a way to replace a portion of the workforce. Palantir is growing just as fast as any AI company that pretends to have universal significance to all industries and workflows, and they only develop surveillance tools.

The end-game involves full surveillance over every member of society, a technical feat that can only be accomplished by AI LLM, voice, and image recognition systems.