It’s about ego. The boss doesn’t know how to make the company perform better, they’re all out of ideas. They have to change something to make it look like they’re doing something, so RTO is the low hanging fruit.

There’s really no more justification needed than that. Looking at practical benefits to explain RTO pushes won’t get you answers because the practical benefits are so slim and conditional relative to the strain it creates.

It’s all about ego. They self-identity as the hardcore alpha boss that deserves high pay because they “earn” it. So to massage that ego, they go into the office even though they dont need to, and are meeting with nobody there. It’s pointless but it feeds their ego.

So they feel alone at the office…and in that worldview they are hardworking (an assumed condition), and nobody else is there, therefore everyone else is not hardworking (regardless of how much work they’re actually doing).

In the current state people can take classes on say Zoom, formulate a question, and then type it into Google, which pulls up an LLM-generated search result from Baird.

Is there profit in generating an LLM application on a much narrower set of training data to sell it as a pay-service competitor to an ostensibly free alternative? It would need to pretty significantly more efficient or effective than the free alternative. I don’t question the usefulness of the technology since it’s already in-use, just the business case feasibility amidst the competitive environment.