One of the biggest fundamental driving forces of the tech industry is creating more excuses to consume computing resources, whether that’s bandwidth, computing power, data storage, etc. Things that encourage increased use of those resources can create (or extract) value in and of themselves while also making money for the companies that own the infrastructure.

Computing infrastructure is a bit like real estate in that it’s very capital-intensive and generates a steady stream of rents, but it’s much more scalable than real estate as long as you can keep increasing the need for more computing resources. This is probably why crypto is still being pushed so heavily despite having no practical application.

AI tools are an excellent way of increasing consumption of computing resources, so industry is going to be incentivized at a structural level to try and shoehorn AI into everything, even if customers don’t want it. That’s obviously not the only reason, but it’s a big contributor as to why there’s so much activity in the space despite the tangible benefits being questionable.