At my company, there is absolutely no mandate for use of AI tooling, but we have a very large number of engineers who are using AI tools enthusiastically simply because they want to. In my anecdotal experience those who do tend to be much better engineers than the ones who are most skeptical or anti-AI (though its very hard to separate how much of this is the AI tooling, and how much is that naturally curious engineers looking for new ways to improve inevitably become better engineers who don't).
The broader point is, I think you are limiting yourself when you immediately reduce AI to snake oil being sold by "business magnates". There is surely a lot of hype that will die out eventually, but there is also a lot of potential there that you guarantee you will miss out on when you dismiss it out of hand.