Comment by TheOtherHobbes

You can both be right. It depends on company culture, which depends on the experience, maturity, and attitude of senior management.

The two extremes of company culture are status cultures and service cultures.

In a status culture the product is the internal status hierarchy. External products are largely incidental goals, and customers and markets are only valued to the extent they create metrics that can be exploited by status seekers. Likewise employees.

In a service culture the goal is customer service through high quality output and employee development.

US corps lean far more to status culture than service culture. This is excellent for short termism, but the culture often becomes dysfunctional, if not outright abusive, and sooner or later it implodes, because status cultures aren't good at accepting reality, or at accurately reading it when they do accept it.

And status cultures tend to cargo cult management, where the C-suite is comparing its status to other C-suites, and copying apparent status-raising actions without thinking them through.

In good times a status culture will overhire, because hiring more employees looks like growth. In bad times status cultures will overfire because "cutting the slack" is lowest common denominator status management.

AI is the same on steroids. You get the promise of more growth with fewer employees, and that's hard to resist, even though it's entirely speculative and could easily be catastrophic. (Company results, and especially lasting company results, are orthogonal to whether some employees get good results with AI, because what actually affects results is how predictable the improvements are, whether there are likely downsides, and whether they're structurally in the right places.)

Whether managers should also be ICs is a side issue.