On the other hand though, with hindsight, imagine the board member saying the same thing about the PC, the internet, mobile computing, cloud computing…
I think both of you are right and it’s only a matter of timing. Time will tell.
It’s easy to imagine that we’re going to make the AI analog of paypal or amazon, but the vast majority of people flailed at doing anything useful with the web until patterns had been established
For the deployment of the PC, I think the vast majority of companies start from an environment where there were already terminal systems or shared workstations available, and the adoption of PCs happened as they became powerful enough to accomplish the tasks that were already being done on the larger computers. It wasn't really a "thou must use PCs, though I know not how they are useful" mandate.
A better example of such a mandate can be found in education, and most of my personal experience with such thou-must-use-technology mandates has been that they've been similarly ineffective as the AI mandate.