If your employees can suddenly magically do more work with the same pay, that's free money (for you). You can pay fewer employees, or pay them less by threatening to replace them with the magic robot.
The magical thinking version of this is that your productivity gains magically translate into more customers and more sales for the same input cost and labor. The free money is really free because you're a magical special snowflake company and every consumer will want your brand of magic machine outputs and not the other guy's. Where does all this money come from? Do those extra customers even exist? Who cares!
Pepsi starts using AI in some magical way that allows them to increase their margins. This allows them to reduce prices while increasing profits. Price-sensitive customers switch from Coca Cola products to Pepsi products. Coca Cola loses some market share, reducing economies of scale, and reducing margins, thus reducing profits. As the cycle repeats, Pepsi moves to dominate the market, and Coca Cola is slowly squeezed down.
Pepsi starts collecting the extra profits with zero price reductions.
Btw, check how much RAM costs today per byte than eg 20 years ago. Even including today's AI driven price increases. Or check how much it costs to keep your house light up nice and bright compared to 50 years ago.
The companies seem to rarely keep the cheaper models around too for something. Surely they could sell them for right price.
And they are! Especially when adjusted for quality and efficiency and how seldom you have to maintain them these days. (Old time-y sitcoms had the males of the show always tinker with their cars for a reason: the stereotype existed because cars _needed_ constant tinkering.)
> Surely they could sell them for right price.
Partially that's because the models from the bad old times are outlawed these days. You couldn't legally sell a Model T these days. Partially because even if you could, you couldn't produce the Model T at the scale that would make it cheap: no one would want such a crappy car at any price.
In the US, they also have annoying tariffs and other import restrictions. So you can't get the cheap and cheerful cars from China (or India or Brazil).
But getting away from cars: for a few decades it was almost a proverb that China would sell you junk for cheap. (And before that Japan had the same reputation. And sometime in the 19th century Germany had that reputation in Britain.)
So if you look around a bit: you can still often buy the low quality stuff from the bad old days, just from a different part of the market.