It's extremely human behavior. We all do it to some degree or another. The incentives work like this:

    - If all your peers are doing it and you do it and it doesn't work, it's not your fault, because all your peers were doing it too. "Who could have known? Everyone was doing it."
    - If all your peers _aren't_ doing it and you do it and it doesn't work, it's your fault alone, and your board and shareholders crucify you. "You idiot! What were you thinking? You should have just played it safe with our existing revenue streams."

And the one for what's happening with RTO, AI, etc.:

    - If all your peers are doing it and you _don't do it_ and it _works_, your board crucifies you for missing a plainly obvious sea change to the upside. "You idiot! How did you miss this? Everyone else was doing it!"

Non-founder/mercenary C-suites are incentivized to be fundamentally conservative by shareholders and boards. This is not necessarily bad, but sometimes it leads to funny aggregate behavior, like we're seeing now, when a critical mass of participants and/or money passes some arbitrary threshold resulting in a social environment that makes it hard for the remaining participants to sit on the sidelines.

Imagine a CEO going to their board today and going, "we're going to sit out on potentially historic productivity gains because we think everyone else in the United States is full of shit and we know something they don't". The board responds with, "but everything I've seen on CNBC and Bloomberg says we're the only ones not doing this, you're fired".