Product owners were promised that LLMs/AI is a magical genie that can do anything, so they make it do everything. The trillions of dollars spent on data centers and thousands of layoffs has to be justified somehow.

There are most likely many different reasons. Cutting costs is a big one; leveraging new functionality in a simpler way is another one. For instance, yesterday I watched some youtube videos and one use case was "count to 100 in a very sad voice", even if that is more a joke and ... pretty useless on its own. The AI did.

What was interesting to me here was that if I were to write a program to do the same, I could most likely do that (just simplify the tasks as they are and implement each one), but it would take me longer. As much as I hate AI, there are real benefits in at the least some areas.

Someone I know said it's because investors get excited to know your product has AI.

I think for a good share of products it isn't necessary, but I also guess that it's very hard to see from the start. I strongly believe there generally is value in AI, but finding this particular application that unlocks it -- is a conundrum. So, if I imagine myself being a head/vp of product, in one of these companies, I have pretty much no choice but to integrate it and study the metrics. Then, after a few iterations the value is either found or not, and depending on the sanity of stakeholders, the useless AI features can be retired. But not before the evidence is collected, because you can't fight the AI frenzy without ones, lol