Through top-down, hard mandates directly by the exec level, absolutely! They're an unstoppable force, beating those incentives.

The execs aren't the ones directly choosing, overseeing and implementing these AI efforts - or in the preceding decades, the software efforts. 9 out of 10 times, they know very little about the details. They may ""spearhead"" it in so far that's possible, but there's tonnes of layers inbetween with their own incentives which are required to cooperate to actually make it work.

If the execs say "Whole office full-time RTO from next month 5 days a week", they really don't depend on those layers at all, as it's suicide for anyone to just ignore it or even fake it.