Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with current AI is that it's super easy to get half-decent results by hooking up a simple agent to a lot of office software- and when it works it looks like pure magic; but getting reliably good results is way harder. So half assed agents abound (I know, I've added three or four to our apps in the last few months) but they can get frustrating for the users really quickly.
I really don't know what this means about the state of the corporate world but companies just don't care if it's bad. Higher ups demand the feature be added but then don't care at all if it's good or even if people actually use it. This isn't that uncommon but "integrate AI somewhere I don't care where" is such an obvious manifestation of this pattern. We've put so many layers between the engineers and customers and…
Frankly I've added some of the features of my own initiative. They were low hanging fruits and really helpful in some cases, and in others they are placeholders waiting to be better integrated or expanded depending on the users requests. Nobody forces anyone to use them or even notice them, so why not?
As I said: these features look like magic in demos, it's not because of the hype that managers want them integrated but because of genuine enthusiasm. But they require more development and maintenance effort than was apparent from the demo. Also, there's a clear discoverability problem due to the fact that an agent has basically no UI.