The AI cores are shown to match and exceed human capabilities, and are regularly exploited for it, with augmenting industries and colonies. Since they are effectively sentient, it would be cool to be able to receive requests and missions from alpha AIs, which can result in them being more cooperative and giving either larger benefits, or more unique effects such as possibly connecting to an AI network and giving information on factions and colonies, and potentially using the info gained to announce a faction's use of AI.