Unless these AI assistants are running on self-managed platforms independent of their developers, all I see is immense counterparty risk.

One real-world constraint is that end-users won't always do what you intend for them to with the thing you engineered.

Those are tactical objectives, not strategic aims. The US is very good at winning tactically, but losing strategically. This is yet another example.

They lost the plot long ago. They're firmly in extraction mode now: how much value can they get from end-users?

No job will ever tell you you've done enough and so you should do something else. If you don't make that call yourself, whose life are you actually living?

>And why not take the alternative approach of identifying the subset of people who have indeed found solid uses and spread their best practices around?

A bottom-up approach has a far better chance of finding those particularly good use cases, and if you lean on the people how found those fits, they're more persuasive than top-down edicts. They actually know what they're talking about. If the point is to leverage AI for better work outcomes, someone with your experience is far more valuable than "here's a dashboard, make the number go up," which seems to be what's going on at Amazon.

The top-down approach to encouraging (mandating?) AI usage strikes me as infantilizing to the workers, who are perfectly capable of choosing which tools they use and when.

The sustainable alternative I've arrived at is private group chats with notifications disabled. Engagement is entirely on my own terms (i.e., I have to manually open the thing to see any updates), and there's no formalized moderation or amplification because it's human-scale enough to let shared social norms govern it.