What practice? I'd like to see non-trivial uses of this outside scenarios other than this [0] which even now seems to show slow but steady improvements over time.

As for the Machiavellian scheming aspect, this seems to me to be very much like the operations of some real-world human CEOs.

[0] https://news.sky.com/story/claude-opus-4-6-this-ai-just-pass...

Yes. Processing information is one thing. Creating momentum among investors, employees, partners, and customers who often want different things is another.