I see one possibility for them, embrace AI and generate a quick/automated first reply by AI marked as such (with a disclaimer) for every post. It should be subject to the same voting system.
The error of moderators and SO here is to discard AI generated answers because some wrong (but sounding right) answers it can generate... when often AI answers are also correct and even at times out do what a single human would have found/answered.
If you can harness the existing human knowledge and correct the "bad" ones (badly rated AI answer given less weight) to feed the models of the future it seems like a win for everyone in the long run. A ban misses this opportunity and generates even more work for moderators which will inevitably also ban some innocent users and valuable content.