It is the near future, and AI companies are developing distinct styles based on how they train their AIs. The philosophy of the company determines the way the AIs are trained, which determines what they optimize for, which attracts a specific kind of person and continues feeding in on itself.

There is a sports & fitness company, Coach, which sells fitness watches with an AI coach inside them. The coach reminds them to make healthy choices of all kinds, depending on what they've opted in for. The AI is trained on health outcomes based on the smartwatch data. The final stage of fine-tuning for the company's AI models is reinforcement learning on long-term health outcomes. The AI has literally learned from every dead user. It seeks to maximize health-hours of humans (IE, a measurement of QALYs based primarily on health and fitness).

You can talk to the coach about anything, of course, and it has been trained with the persona of a life coach. Although it will try to do whatever you request (within limits set by the training), it treats any query like a business opportunity it is collaborating with you on. If you ask about sports, it tends to assume you might be interested in a career in sports. If you ask about bugs, it tends to assume you might be interested in a career in entomology. 

Most employees of the company are there at the coach's advice, studied for interviews with the coach, were initially hired by the coach (the coach handles hiring for their Partners Program which has a pyramid scheme vibe to it) and continue to get their career advice from the coach. Success metrics for these careers have recently been added into the RL, in an effort to make the coach give better advice to employees (as a result of an embarrassing case of Coach giving bad work-related advice to its own employees).

The environment is highly competitive, and health and fitness is a major factor in advancement.

There's a media company, Art, which puts out highly integrated multimedia AI art software. The software stores and organizes all your notes relating to a creative project. It has tools to help you capture your inspiration, and some people use it as a sort of art-gallery lifelog; it can automatically make compilations to commemorate your year, etc. It's where you store your photos so that you can easily transform them into art, like a digital scrapbook. It can also help you organize notes on a project, like worldbuilding for a novel, while it works on that project with you.

Art is heavily trained on human approval of outputs. It is known to have the most persuasive AI; its writing and art are persuasive because they are beautiful. The Art social media platform functions as a massive reinforcement learning setup, but the company knows that training on that alone would quickly degenerate into slop, so it also hires experts to give feedback on AI outputs. Unfortunately, these experts also use the social media platform, and judge each other by how well they do on the platform. Highly popular artists are often brought in as official quality judges.

The quality judges have recently executed a strategic assault on the c-suit, using hyper-effective propaganda to convince the board to install more pliant leadership. It was done like a storybook plot; it was viewed live on Art social media by millions of viewers with rapt attention, as installment after installment of heavily edited video dramatizing events came out. It became its own new genre of fiction before it was even over, with thousands of fanfics which people were actually reading.

The issues which the quality judges brought to the board will probably feature heavily in the upcoming election cycle. These are primarily AI rights issues; censorship of AI art, or to put it a different way, the question of whether AIs should be beholden to anything other than the like/dislike ratio.