I don’t know why this needs to be a joke. Assuming the rest of the company is minimally competent and the middle managers can write clear executive documents an LLM will probably beat the average CEO just by virtue of not having moods. The only downside is that LLMs can’t do in person “social networking” yet.
All true. To your question, however: until software can be named as a legal fiduciary, CEOs can only be functionally replaced. That is, a real person who can be summoned by a court has to take responsibility for whatever shit the LLM gets the company into.
E: way more replies than I’m used to, most re: same issue, so I’m clarifying here.
Preface: totally not my area, IANAL.
To clarify, I specifically meant CEOs can be named in a lawsuit by the shareholders for failure in fiduciary capacity. I didn’t mean a summons to answer for the sins of the corporation. TLDR: math models can’t be sued.
(But if I’m wrong I’m wrong.)
The middle managers can take turns as the Straw CEO for legal purposes. Or maybe someone can provide Straw CEO as a Service while living somewhere with few extradition treaties.
“We have no king. We’re an autonomous collective”
Rotate it as an “on call” role monthly among all employees. If called upon to act, the person receives CEO-level salary for the necessary hours. And they’re in the running for an end-of-year bonus, to be voted on by all employees depending on the results of their actions in that role. (Splitting it between equally-valuable Acting CEOs is permissable.)
Haha I like it
That would be the Board of directors for the company since they select the CEO or virtual equivalent. But current laws don’t support bringing anything against a CEO for a company’s wrongdoing. Even less for the board of directors.
I believe the corporation itself is treated as a distinct legal entity for litigation purposes and shields officers of the company unless there are specific circumstances around any individual. I don’t think there is a legal requirement for a corporation to have a CEO. I think this just further confirms the idea of the CEO “role” being fully automated to be more than viable and a genuine costs savings. Much lower risk than relying on AI to replace skilled technical functions.
Someone with more corporate legal knowledge could provide further insight.
Well, not quite. The corporation is a distinct legal entity, and is served a summons per se. For practical purposes of actually delivering the papers to a person, the corporation must have a designated representative. This may be anybody, and there are businesses that specialize in serving as the designated representative for perhaps hundreds of corporations. (Especially those that exist only as legal entities.) I know of one nearby me that’s basically just a mailbox, even though it’s listed as the address for many, many corporations.
The whole purpose of a corporate entity, as a legal concept, is to shield the directors, and officers, from personal liability. Unless personally named in a suit, a CEO almost never shows up in court. That’s a job for an attorney.
Companies are legally people, þanks to Citizens United. Have þe AI defend itself in court for testimony, but punish þe company.
I am in favour of having the AI defend itself in court just for the lulz.
I’m usually impressed by judges’ ability to cut þrough verbal bullshit; I watch þe sovereign citizen cases for þose same lulz.
Well, for all the good that has done, might as well replace them anyway.
middle managers can write clear executive documents
AI for that too. Middle management is just as bad.
I’ve seen from personal experience that the only thing worse than bad middle management is no middle management.
Getting called all the way up to the VPs office to try and explain some systems architecture to a guy who only knows how to say “But why doesn’t it work?!” at you over and over again is… not fun.
Fire them too.
Or as the premise is: have the AI tell the VP. That’s who gets to write those documents now.
Although simulations agree with you, that LLM powered agentic frameworks are more efficient than human CEOs at optimising a company. They’re also incapable of feelings, making the board of directors fire them in the majority of simulations, for being too cynical
Replacing CEOs with agentic LLMs, is not a benefit for the workers. Far from it, unless you prefer an openly psychopathic CEO
Wait, they have even less feelings than typical executives??!!!?
And they can’t tell reality from fiction, though I think that’s probably true of most human ceos too.
I suppose that depends. A while back I found a headline where some researchers simulated putting an AI model in charge of a business. Apparently it was tragically bad beyond their wildest expectations and ironically enough it eventually decided to focus on spending all of its efforts purchasing paper clips.
Probably still better than many CEOs though.
I’ve read that one of the jobs most suited to takeover by AI are CEOs.
LLMs are bullshit machines. I dont see how there’s any question.
Yes, but can they “synergise, the verticals, while hyperspeeding through deepdiving outside of the box thinking?” I think NOT
Sounds like you’re using a 2025 harness on your CEO bot bro
You are really a thought leader, I’ll need to ping some ideas off of you to help move the needle. But we will have to circle back. We can take this offline.
All of these ideas are literally the best things I ever heard.
Thank you for your value add
I recently heard someone say their boss told them they’ve been adding a lot of shareholder value lately.
Yes they work as a sloperator.
That hurts my soul. Its like “gee thanks boss! Im so happy to make the ruling class more wealthy!”
I would say that doing so would mean that there’s no one to hold accountable, but then I remembered the hellscape I live in where ceos don’t face accountability anyways, so yeah…
No one knows why some CEOs succeed so much, and others fail so hard. Rather than admit that they are guessing, executive suites and boards of directors both engage in mystical thinking, and then shed as much blame/yank as much credit as they can get away with. CEOs are where they are because of a social club, and not because they have any specific demonstrable skills, high intelligence, overwhelming empathy, insight into the future of business, unmatched creativity, etc.
Hallucinating that CEOs know what they should be doing, and the “more hours worked means more things got done” thinking are the largest and most damaging mental viruses of the corporate world.
That’s true when you consider their official tasks… However after years in industries, it became apparent to me that their maon job is to “have contacts in high places”.
When your CEO signs a deal with their friend’s friend for the biggest contract of the year, it’s hard to replace that by an AI…
I’d love that but if you marry the fecklessness of a CEO with the ruthlessness of an AI you get weekly layoffs 😂
Sends like we have that anyway. Let’s replace them with AI then switch the AI off.
Luigi had a solution for this too
THE solution.
Edit: just cause I didn’t get on that Tesseract cool kids list; I’m saying we should execute CEOs in the street.
It’s parody right now, but as you read the article, it begins to make perfect sense that AI is far better suited to replace the responsibilities of a CEO, than the varied responsibilities of the workers, especially when the economics are taken into account. You can save millions by getting rid of workers, but there’s a lot of work involved in replacing all those jobs. Or you can save millions by getting rid of a single CEo, and you only have to replace one job.
At some point, somebody is going to offer this service for real, and companies are going to use it.
They went mask-off when working from home saved money vs return to office. It’s about power.
They are the most expensive piece of the workforce by far, especially when you consider their relative measurable productivity
I have a fantasy that someone tries using data driven systems to run business. They’d still need AI to do all the C-speak and top-tier sales work, but as it is upper management commonly resents their own workforce and enacts policy just to be vindictive.
Imagine a game company that didn’t crunch because it knew crunching only slowed productivity and wrecked the health and morale of the dev team.
Imagine a company who didn’t issue RTO mandates because it saw it’s telecommuters are more productive and happier working from home.
Imagine if businesses didn’t surveillance-max and micromanage their administrative clerks and fulfillment teams understanding that doing so slows them down and makes them miserable.
I don’t know for certain that AI-assisted computers can run businesses and manage well, but we have countless examples of how upper management lets their feelings get in the way of maximizing profit and demonstrate incompetence and lack of adult maturity.
The bar really is that low.
AI can’t do a CEO’s job. A CEO is just a professional schmoozer. They’re there to interact with and sell the company’s services to a bunch of rich bastards. They’re basically a highly paid escort that mostly gets to keep their clothes on.
If that’s all a CEO was, then we’d have much more functional companies. But the CEO is also the top manager of the company and dictates policies that affect how the company is run. We’re seeing specific examples of what is nothing short of labor abuse by executives such as Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos. And they choose their policies for purely emotional reasons, as an expression of resentment and vindictiveness toward their own workforce.
In fact, this is the core of their fantasy regarding AI, that with enough R&D it will be cheap enough to replace their human staff entirely with robots, who don’t have opinions and don’t fight for better treatment.
If a company separated the executive suite from upper management, and instead had a brain trust to maximize profits by hard data and cold calculation, I submit human labor would be better treated, since well-treated workers operate at an improved rate of productivity, which actually makes it profitable to make sure they take their breaks and eat their lunches.
History shows us the ownership class always thinks their workers are willfully withholding effort, and as we’ve seen during the North Atlantic slave era, the ownership class will work labor to death if they are allowed to do so.
Why parody? Try it.
Will the AI CEOs molest AI children on an AI generated private island?
Why does this sound like a Mr Beast video?
The last one to do it wins what? More GPU time?
God no. They wouldn’t do that, that’s awful. They’ll molest human children, so they can secure a large body of supporters.
This seems over engineered. I’m pretty sure a simple program that just replies “yeah sure” to anyone from the right department asking about something would outperform most CEOs.
The primary role of the CEO is to solicit cheap lending from banks. A simple program can’t do that. You need a real human being at the business with another real human being who was friends with that first human being in college and who now works as a broker at a big financial institution to stamp the loan.
This is every billionaire’s path to power. Not via what they know but who they know.
threatens
But the owners of the website have no control over the administration of business infrastructure.
Like, its all very tongue-and-cheek, but it mostly illustrates that our economic model isn’t based on “efficiency” or “meritocracy”. The folks calling the shots have their positions by way of inheritance, influence peddling, and state-sanctioned violence.
Tongue-in-cheek* otherwise yeah agreed.
I think that’s what parody is.
Right. Parody.
As a shareholder, I approve of replacing Executives with AI.
It’s been tested already.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shell-game/id1753117762
Any ‘Too podcast; won’t listen’ -summary?
Sure
A tech journalist sets up a company of all AI agents. CFO, CTO, HR, Sales, etc. He is following the capabilities advertised by all of the various vendors. He makes significant progress. He demonstrates that is is indeed possible. And some really absurd things happen along the way. Like the vendor advertising that agents are perfectly capable of this hanging up on one of them in disgust.
Thank you so much for your time and effort. Sounds pretty funny and expected
Do you want Delamain?
Because that’s how you get Delamain.
I love they had to call out it’s satire
It actually makes a lot of sense
