They are not "asleep at the wheel"; it's just that the people in charge (the "MBA types") have no clue what to do!

There's an old saying, if you judge a fish's smarts by how well it can ride a bicycle, it will always seem dumb.

The people who have risen to the top of at Google are built for a different environment than what's needed right now. They are good at playing their political games, sabotaging each other, etc.; i.e. all of the petty games that managers play in big companies. But the AI era demands a different skill set: how to bring together incredibly smart people and forge them into a battle group that will achieve victory in the ongoing battle for AGI! It's as if you have built an army of tanks, but the next battle is being fought on the high seas.