If anyone wants to revisit this thread, I have these answers!
I farm, as my fulltime job. I do AI on the regular - in fact, my favorite way to keep a boar pig is in little white tubes.
The reason AI is so common in livestock is not just economics (if ball python breeding as an industry were to stop, we’d be upset, but life would go on. If cattle breeding were to stop, so would civilization as we know it) but safety.
You can keep a male snake. It’s exactly the same as keeping a female snake. There’s no issue there. Crocs are dangerous, but you can keep a male as easily as a female, males aren’t exponentially more dangerous.
However, bulls make up 2% of livestock, and yet account for 25% of all animal related deaths (of humans) per year. That number includes, like, lions and hippos and the like. You do not want to keep one if there is any choice. Also, not all of them are nice to the ladies, either. Some can be brutal, and you sure don’t want to take a chance on your livestock getting injured either.
Happily, they are easily trained to mount an “artificial cow” (y’know the gymnastics event with the “horse”? It looks almost exactly like that) as are stallions, goats, rams and pigs. It is neither terribly hard nor terribly expensive. I have a good friend who trained her stallions to collect, managed and collected them herself well into her 80s, she only gave it up 2 years ago when she fully lost sight in one eye (she is a total bad@ss).
Further, for bulls and boar pigs, there is a device that …how to phrase this nicely, can be inserted in a way that part of the population deeply enjoys in order to stimulate the prostate and induce orgasm, and this is done while the animal is safely constrained in a device called a “chute”. You can bet they just walk right into it after a couple of times. Which brings us to the very important question of - how do you make a snake ejaculate? No ejaculate = no AI. At least not safely for the snake. You can collect directly from the testes of a recently deceased animal, which is clearly not ideal for anyone involved.
Once you’ve collected your sample, as a general rule it gets divided. Many mammals produce absolutely epic amounts of sperm. If you can’t separate into at least 50 straws from a stallion collection, your boy has a low sperm count with bad viability. A bull = over 100. Live cover, they might be able to cover that many - over the course of a year. I keep a good beef bull. This year, we’re increasing the herd up to 20 brood cows, with 6 more maturing the year after, and we are now raising out a 2nd bull (beef bulls are far, far gentler than dairy bulls and beef cows way more skittish and defensive, so we let them work it out themselves. Mostly) because I want to be sure that if 3 cows all come into heat the same day, they get bred. When I worked dairy, I’d just AI them, it takes all of 7 minutes per cow, including thawing out the sperm.
How much sperm your average snake produces, I don’t think has been studied. But, with the absence of external testes, I’m betting way, way less.
Then, there’s the other end of the spectrum - the ladies. Mammals come into heat. It’s usually REALLY obvious. Cows will bellow, and paw, go off their feed, be really restless and “ride” other cows (it’s called “bulling”, as in, “Call the A.I. guy, 57 is bulling”) They’re also pretty big. Now, this falls to me a lot because I’m a woman with little hands, and it’s easy for me to go right on ahead and feel the cervix, even in beasties as small as a goat or sheep (small being a relative term, many of these animals still outweigh me, and I’m not a twig). If the cervix is soft, I insert the straw of semen and we’re good!
Further, if we want them to come into heat at a certain time, that’s like 2 injections a week apart. We’ve got this hormones in mammals thing down pretty pat.
Now, receptiveness in snakes is hard enough to determine, but then, you have to get the sperm inside. So that’s 2 problems right there. Trust me, the larger an animal is, the much, MUCH easier it is to manage this. The largest snake you’ve ever seen is still relatively small compared to most of the animals we routinely AI. I don’t care how big the snake is, the average sow weighs 500# and can be up to a 1,000. A small cow is still an 800# beastie.
So, that’s a LOT of reasons TO use AI for many domestic species. None of those reasons really hold up for reptiles. There are also a lot of how-to questions that we’ve answered with mammals, that we have not with reptiles. And we’re unlikely to, because, there are no reasons to. The simplest solution is often the best. The simplest solution is to let a male reptile do it and stay out of it. Without huge, pressing, economic or safety reasons, there’s really no reason to look past the simplest solution.
Hope that helps.
I have never worked with cattle in my life, but I just assumed that bulls of domestic breeds would be… a little less murdery. 
I can definitely see the appeal of using A.I., there. Pigs, also! I’m almost surprised boars don’t do just as much damage…
I also remember a discussion among kingsnake owners, on how to make sure the female doesn’t attempt to eat the male when they’re introduced. >_<;