I hear the frustration companies going in a different direction than you want. But AI is everywhere, and it's not as "bad" as many want to believe it to be.
AI has been on your phone since the early iPhones, when Siri was introduced. It's a key part of how a lot of tech functions, and I think the distrust comes from a place of not understanding how it works.
At the heart of AI, is really just a lot of statistics, probability, calculus, and linear algebra. It's largely a game of guessing probabilities by using probability distribution functions through what we call maximum likelihood estimators. Through that, we can build algorithms that pick the option with the highest probability of what you are looking for, and do that over and over for every number, character, ect. to get to the "answer" presented to you.
AI can benefit almost anyone willing to learn how to use it. People love to hate on how bad chatGPT can be, but ignore how good it can be as well. For example, I can't always rely on it to give me the correct solution (it makes silly math errors too often) but it will give me the steps, allowing me to learn on my time without relying on a TA or office hours. My professor tells us to use it, because we had to learn an entire high level stats book in 5 weeks. It's not about it doing the work for me, it's about understanding the correct steps, and then being able to ask follow up questions. The information is 95% accurate imo. I would have been able to understand the content in undergrad so much better. Thankfully I have it in grad school.
This isn't some random black box voodoo witch craft thing designed to take over your life. It's just a guessing game as to finding what information your looking for. For those in the white collar work force, you will need to either learn it or get left behind. Gen Z is growing up with these tools and when you can do three times as much work in an 8 hour work day, you better believe the boss is going to pick them over you. And yes, I have friends who have increased productivity that much with chatGPT.