I think there is a significant societal difference, because that last step is a lot bigger than the ones before.
In general, businesses tend to try to reduce headcount as people retire or leave, even if it means some workers have very little to do. Redundancies are expensive and take a long time—the larger they are, the longer it takes.
Businesses are also primarily staffed and run by humans who do not wish to lose their own jobs.
For a real-world example of a task that is already >99% automatable, consider real estate conveyancing.
The actual transaction is already entirely automated via simple algorithms—the database of land ownership is updated indicating the new owner, and the figures representing monetary wealth are updated in two or more bank accounts.
The work prior to that consists of identity confirmation, and document comprehension to find and raise possible issues that the buyer and seller need to be informed about.
All of this is already reasonably practicable with existing LLMs and image matching.
Have any conveyancing solicitors replaced all of their staff thusly?
Indeed. The incentives to put new ones on the market are very limited, due to legalities and economics.
A corporation has a limited window of patent monopoly, so a fairly short time period to recoup their investment to develop, licence and build out manufacturing capacity—thus need to sell it for a high price or sell high volumes.
It is a long and expensive process to get a new compound approved for use as a food additive, and it needs to be done separately in each major jurisdiction—at least China, USA and EU.
A new sweetener is directly competing against all the other ones that are already on the market—merely ‘being much sweeter’ isn’t enough.
It has to be significiantly better in some other way, if only because it will be considerably more expensive at first.