> has any of that led to an interesting conversation? An exchange of information with other humans? Or at least taken something dull out of the way so the actual interesting conversation can take place?

Yes! Lots.

It’s kinda similar to the concept that money doesn’t buy happiness, it buys time to do the things and see people who make you happy. Offloading drudgery to computers buys time to do the human stuff

For example: you can have a much more invigorating discussion with a coworker if every iteration takes 2 minutes instead of 2 hours. Moves from an async “let’s schedule a followup” to a lively real time collaboration

Or the budgets example, we could have a conversation about values and priorities because chatgpt made me a UI that let us drag sliders around and see the impact of our decisions in real-time.