what the hell are you on about? Have you ever been employed? Employees do got reprimanded because of their mistakes. Employers just don't sue via the courts for the same reason you don't sue your spouse first thing when they break a plate. They settle via internal penalties first.
(Not only that, employees who got a reprimand too heavy handed can sue back. Plenty of cases around.)
"AI" company provides a service. They might or might not be adequate, that's not the point, the point is that the ability to sue them must always be on the cards if the agreed upon terms aren't met.
so not niche at all. You described a bit of everything.
Niche is more like "ISO26262 compliant, response time under 50ms, measured with a oscilloscope with at least 40MHz bandwidth, failure rate less than 10^-7, proven with maths and soak tests". It gets more niche the closer you get to hardware.
Next word prediction will get you laughed out of the room.
It's just that I don't vibe with the sentiment that company culture are a one-way street from management.
Anyway I do see that after a while the people who would have said no would all be gone. So maybe this is not the start of the decline but actually closer to the end of Microslop.
Where I work, there have been a lot of pushback where that BS doesn't make a lick of sense (the crown jewel of BS request atm: "let's put AI in the bootloader").
Good governance "should" also mean that those kinds of pushback are encouraged.
The hard part is not building such toys, it's the convincing people with money to buy said toy. This is where he earned his applause.