its not even AI. most of the cloud offerings are commodities now.

the marginal technological direction is determined by middle managers whoes primary motivation is “what new customer facing feature can I launch at this years re:invent and build a little empire” (of course this is a shrinking offering as tech debt and complexity pile up)

junior engineers are burned and churned on execution, seniors are project managers, principals just do high level reviews & high level fire fighting (note not actually leading the tech)

director and above just their spend time on “what to kill” or “who to fire” as priorities change every 6 months