I do not have any fellow senior engineers I work with so I cannot speak directly to the question you asked. I do however have a lot of experience with AI. This is my take on it; for what that is worth.
I have been working on AI since the late 80's and there have been some drastic changes. Modern day artificial neural networks are a real game changer. It is amazing what we can achieve with them. With that said there are a lot of concerns to be had with the monetization of AI by large corporations. I personally only use local AI with models I train specifically for a task with high quality data that is public domain. Where corporate AI tends to train with anything they can scrape from the internet with little to no vetting. This produces inferior training that produces poor results with frequency.
People tend to forget that AI is more than just chat bots on the internet. We use visual AI for searching landmarks to help find lost people in the wilderness. We use visual AI to provide adaptive cruise control, parallel parking assistance, etc. AI is a lot more than chat bots. Though people tend to look at corporate AI as AI when it is typically the worst quality AI you could choose to use. Now I get it, you cannot train a base model yourself without a significant investment in a high end GPU. Though, you can train a minimally trained model of smaller size with a RTX 3060 TI that is only around $200.00 - $300.00 USD. This is going to be painfully slow but doable.
I see such negative comments constantly on AI from people that really do not understand what AI actually is, demonstrated by their comments. Corporations setting up server farms that would require their own dedicated nuclear power plant? No, I am not with that. Local AI that can be tailored to very specific needs can indeed be a great help. We should always keep in mind that we are dealing with a neural network. Just like humans are not always correct AIs will not always be correct either. You have to vet the information you get from an AI.
AI is like fire. Fire has burned down communities and it has made food more nutritious (via cooking) and in some cases edible (many vegetables are toxic even to a lethal level when consumed raw). It has heated habitations to make them livable in colder months. To judge something only by its worst possible metric is not rational. AI is used in the Medical field and many others for a very long time. Saving the lives of many people. I wish that when people get upset at corporate AI they would direct their frustrations where they belong. On the corporations that are doing everything they can to monetize AI, including having ridiculous classes on writing prompts 
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