I think the business idiots know genAI doesn't work. They push it regardless because they think they will win in the long run.
For example, w.r.t coding, I think this is their plan (Mo Bitar talks a little about this in his latest video about "forward deploy engineers"). A lot of this might already be obvious to many in this sub, but I am just sharing my thoughts. The plan is:
Force everyone to use AI. If AI doesn't give working code, make them try multiple times (i.e. run an agent loop with tests/verification). It's a game of chance. So, it should output working code at least once in 100 or 1000 attempts (at least what they think, not me). Now make this work for any stage of the project (new feature / bug-fix / maintenance/ re-write etc). Reduce the cost of tokens by a lot, so even a million attempts are not that expensive to run. If AI doesn't work, blame the engineers using it, not the model, so they are forced to prompt it differently. Now, since the cost of the code-guesser-agent is lower than the cost of a human, everyone stops hiring SWEs (again.. what they think, not me). Every GPU is now a utility (like electricity). Those who own the GPUs, the models and the electricity generation make most of the money.
Now, do I think this will work? NO. I see many wrong assumptions in this line of thinking. But, business idiots love this irrational strategy. They want to get rid of human labor at any cost. Because, if not, true capitalism will show that those who actually build and maintain the products are the ones actually contributing to the business, and therefore have to be paid more. And the business idiots become less relevant with time.
That said, I do acknowledge that in other domains (example: Car manufacturing), labor has lost its power, and don't get paid well today, probably because of automation. Software might also get there with time. Until then, capitalism will push existing software to be optimised more and push companies to rely more on in-built/open-source software than on SAAS, until everything eventually becomes open-source. This I think is 2 decades away. Until then, human labor in software will have to be respected with good pay.
And when human software engineers lose their power as well, the world becomes even more of an Oligarchy. The common people will have to self organise and try making it fairer for everyone.
Regardless, we will never get AGI. Small domain-specific models may be used a lot more in products where incorrect predictions don't lose customers' money.
It's just a guess folks. Please do show me where I am wrong.