In my experience, for every customer support agent that really wants to help people and cares about their problems, there are at least ten who don't even read what you wrote and answer with prefabricated blocks of text that have little to do with what you asked. If AI customer support actually tries to understand what I ask of it and help me, and there are still (motivated) humans available for the more tricky cases that AI can't handle, that might be a win...

> If everyone just exists in service of the product development lifecycle, who and what are the products actually for?

Anyone holding passive index ETFs in their brokerage / 401k / pension accounts.