I don’t favor forced adoption... but your second sentence just isn't true of individual people. It is ture of the industry in general. But individual people tend to stick with what they know and shy away from new things until something forces them out of that state. Usually it is someone else who tried a new tool and is suddenly able to do things easier or what not. It only takes a few power users to turn the tide. So forcing shouldn't be needed. Just enabling those power users.

It's kinda like the push to return to office. It was driven by corps having invested in the "can't fail (ignoring the last previous crash)" real estate market and buying their offices. If everyone suddenly works from home instead of in the office, then those investments go bad because demand for office space is way down. So they tell people to go back to the office, hoping to return to that "every business needs offices!" status quo and save their investments. Though the demand is false (especially combined with layoffs), so it won't necessarily cause any new corp to want that office space. If they don't have the sunk cost, then they don't need to accept the rest of the fallacy.

With AI, it's the same but just replace building investment with R&D as well as data centre investment. A lot of the companies really pushing AI are the ones that will profit from people going along with that. They really want to build a dependence amongst users as well as a good reputation for execs so they can get a return on the investment. Then there's also the True Believers (who think LLMs are brilliant AIs that can solve anything if given the right prompts) and the FOMOs (who don't know much about it but see the world moving towards it and don't want to miss it because if it was a real AI, missing it could be a massive mistake). There's also some people who just don't have various skills and want the AI agents to fill those gaps (and probably don't have a very good idea about what the LLMs are actually doing in those gaps).

At this point, I think it's a mistake to go all in on this tech. LLMs aren't reliable, and their ability to "perform" is more about their flexibility than being well-suited for any task. They'll go directly from saying things that seem "insightful" (they have no insight) to making the dumbest "mistake" (a mistake requires intent, which they lack, they just predict tokens). But there's all kinds of false and true (albeit misguided IMO) demand right now and it's still in early pricing mode (remember the intent is to make that investment money back).

Oh and there's also China which has been making more efficient models and open sourcing some of them. If they continue to do this, there's a decent chance those investments will never give the desired returns, at least not to those who are trying to sell tokens. Or those who depend on those selling tokens, like any hardware companies selling hardware under the assumption that it will then make the money to pay for itself (which I believe both nVidia and AMD have done).

It's mirroring the dotcom bubble with that last bit because network cable companies started loaning the money to pay for their cables to ISPs, expecting returns that never came.

The subscription plans are insanely cheap currently, but won't be forever. Atm you can pay $200/month to get anywhere from 1.2x to 5x faster depending where you are on the learning curve. If people aren't taking advantage of that then it's equivalent to if your office had a team of 10 engineers but only 5 of them are being given any tasks and the others are told to do nothing.

As to people adopting it naturally, there are any number of reasons why they wouldn't, even if it's good. Firstly it's a massive change and people as a rule do not like change. Secondly it's a learning curve, it's not easy, and you have to invest time in it and initially it will make you slower rather than faster. Thirdly, what's in it for the employee? They're not gonna get paid more if they use AI to get 2x more work done, they're employer captures all of that. They work the same hours, have to learn a whole new workflow, just go get the same pay. Why bother?