As a more obvious example consider that cars were just invented and the post office management thinks that they could improve performance of letter carriers. But right now cars are slow, break down a lot and there isn't much infrastructure for them. Lots of letter carriers will (rightly) think that it is a waste of time because they need to get in, stop, park between every house and they break down so often it isn't worth it and half of their route is unsuitable for a car anyways. But if cars are forced for a while they will find out what routes work well for cars and which don't, improve the cars and related infrastructure to make cars more effective and other improvements to unlock more productivity.
So yes, right now management is wasting money on cars and gas for no increased productivity. And yes, measuring how much gas each employee uses and encouraging to use more is obviously stupid in isolation. But the idea is to force adoption to iron out the kinks and find out where it can improve productivity. It is basically funding a research project.
Despite decades of the industry telling itself that we "pay for performance" or whatever, that has never been the case because we can't really measure performance very well. Where I have seen it done ok (not great, just ok), it was massively labor intensive and did not last, and was only done fully when considering promotion.
So, as you observe, now we have some new technique that managers are sure will increase performance by 50+%, if only people would use it. They can't just raise their expectations of performance by 50%, because they can't measure performance to within 50%! So, they measure the thing they can: token consumption.
I’m all for a trial run, but it needs to be done like any research experiment. With a goal and measurements along the way. Not by going blind and hurting your workers/customers.
The number of times I have been told "oh I talked to so and so and they are having SUCH a good time using X" and then three years later "oh I talked to so and so and they got rid of X as soon as they could, we should switch!"
Not with the same pressure as everyone in the company (literally everyone, regardless of the job role) has to burn AI tokens, and attend forced AI workshops, still it is always running after the next new shinny.