It's because the average organization has lots of people who don't care about their own productivity and won't adopt new tools or processes unless forced to. This is true of most new tech - lots of workers had to be forced into using computers - but AI also has some other bumps to cross like lots of people who tried early models and then wrote them off, not realizing how fast they'd improve. And most orgs have no infrastructure or processes for allocating individuals token budgets, and most employees have no experience of properly deploying budgets.

Roll it all together and saying "just use it dammit" has some obvious advantages:

1. It's clear.

2. It's simple.

3. It eliminates all excuses employees might come up with for not using it.

The people at the top of these companies aren't stupid. They might have miscalculated how many tokens people can actually use, but that's very hard to calculate because usage is opaque and tools/processes change on a nearly weekly basis. They will eventually build out processes, tools, social conventions and performance metrics that take into account efficiency of token usage. But this is hard! Most managers aren't really assessed on the precise productivity of their teams, for instance, because productivity is often poorly defined.

> what leads people to this type of thinking once they get in a group setting

Game theory! The downside of being brave vastly outweighs the upside. For the C-suite, there is no cost to herdlike-behavior, regardless of the outcome. However, there is a very high personal downside to being a maverick, and your board later discovers you made the wrong choice against the grain. The upside of being maverick and right is very limited.

Once a behavior has become mainstream, hopping on the bandwagon is no longer individually attributable to decision-makers, but is seen (and reported) as a macro-economic phenomenon: Nadella, Zuckerberg and Bezos didn't overhire - the American tech industry overhired.

Won’t be canned for going with the herd. I think it’s that simple, even if the herd is running off a cliff.

This is a consequence of elements of monopoly power existing in your organization. When you don't have to compete for income you honestly forget how. Then the company becomes a cargo cult of bad ideas driven by managers struggling to differentiate themselves.