Why are so many companies pushing for AI adoption by developers?

Because they see AI as the gateway to your invitation of course. Money only cares about money/ROI. A bunch of tech CEOs in finance circles have hyped up AI to drive adoption, more "conventional" business/management types buy into the hype and dive in. Do pilot programs. If it works, great, start planning the downsize... If it doesn't...well it will work, so why even spend the cycles thinking on it?

Of course people will need convincing. People hate change.

I recently saw a PM newsletter that was detailing how to encourage and "reward" LLM adoption in teams which also kind of stuck out to me. These are genuinely useful but limited tools that now have to live up to huge promises and valuations so tech leadership is trying to force adoption.

tl;dr: those of us not heavily invested in AI need "convincing" because the technology is almost all down-side with little up-side.

We can start with bosses imposing which tools we use. We usually don't like that. Especially when these mandates are accompanied by unreasonable expectations (productivity will increase by 50%! You'll become a 10x developer!). Now you're under even more pressure than before, with no real possibility of satisfying those expectations. Makes for a wonderful work environment, I'm sure.

Follow that up with the extremely negative social externalities AI brings to the table: resource exploitation in poorer neighborhoods, labor exploitation in poor nations, etc. In WV, where I live, the legislature have already stripped communities of their political rights, with the goal of being more "data-center friendly", which to me sums up AI rather nicely: an anti-democratic, anti-people, big-investor-friendly technology.

All of the money spent on AI hardware and training models needs ROI.