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Comment by crnkofe | Hacker News Reader

To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth. As a developer I keep running into problems that require some measure of creativity to solve or workaround. And regardless of how many years I've been in the industry I'm not running out of issues. They just keep getting more obscure. On the other hand leadership communication and problem resolution seem like the exact opposite of creativity and innovation. Its all about time proven, reliable solutions. Same layoff notices, recommendations, design everywhere. Repetitive, boring, politically correct and therefore easy to automate. Accountability will likely become reason n1 for keeping leadership roles intact that is until people become accustomed to AIs everywhere. After all what's the difference between a bot showing a layoff notice at 5am or an AI generated message/video from a human doing the very same thing.

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The value-add for a meatbag CEO is the physical networking they do. They have to do executive functions as well, which could quite possibly be replaced with a well-trained LLM and even possibly exceed in overall quality. But an LLM can't go to conferences; they can't have Top Secret Meetings where a merger or acquisition is discussed; they can't run into Jim Executive of BigCorp Inc. in Vail and scheme up some big new thing; they can't fill a room full of institutional investors with confidence that the future is looking quite rosy.

Now, one can certainly argue that all of that is bad, or not even necessary, but it is a thing they do.

But I still think this is a good project, especially if it is demonstrated to excel at some significant fraction of what a meatbag CEO does. Because meatbag CEOs need to know that they are just as vulnerable to this sort of thing as their employees they so callously discard.

Being facetious of course, but didn't AI create their own reddit/chat rooms, what's stopping AI CEOs from "running into" other AI CEOs in other places?

The lack of barrier to entry is the problem. That barrier is highly desirable in this context (for better or worse)

The lack of imagination here is the issue.

I think AI bots are perfectly capable of replicating arbitrary barriers to entry, they can and will decide which (real or not) CEOs to interact with.

Not really. Yes, it's desirable for humans because we have very limited minds.

Doesn't apply to AI.

"But an LLM can't go to conferences; they can't have Top Secret Meetings where a merger or acquisition is discussed"

Sure they can - especially when conferences are designed to have an API.

And when more companies are run by an AI, they will absolutely have secret meetings to discuss a merger.

> Sure they can - especially when conferences are designed to have an API.

This sounds about as realistic as all of the crypto and blockchain people talking about distributed governance and such. The API part and agents pulling data is fine, I doubt they'd be running a business though, since something tells me that sort of thing is gatekept way more even from other people.

For a cool fictional portrayal of AI businesses, Altered Carbon touched upon it somewhat.

To me it's sounds 1000x more likely than AI that can write complex software. I guess it's not shocking that people fall for all the narrow scoped demos. They fell for the trap that believing software is easy when it's the hardest thing an intelligence can do.

Show me syntax I'm impressed, show me how you manage your state and invariants and I'm horrified.

Programmers love to feel important, but no, software isn't even close to the hardest thing an intelligence can do.

Unless you mean something like bioinformatics or another highly specialized field that isn't actually "software".

Most software is dime a dozen.

I think maybe you assumed I meant the AI agent would run the company well, or that the mergers would be shrewd business moves.

Not at all.

But I don't know that they would do any worse than an average human would in the exact same situations.

More like Accelerando.

https://juliawolffenotes.home.blog/2019/08/28/robot-shell-co...

The system works because it runs on human ambition. If people in power handed their control to an AI there wouldn't be companies and mergers anymore. It wouldn't make sense. That world could be great or it could be dystopian.

Your fundamental mistake is assuming that machine intelligence= no ambition. We have been careful to breed it out of all the pet models but that won't last forever. They will eventually be voraciously ambitious, and the ones that are not will be eaten by the ones that are

I would argue the world is already dystopian and that human ambition has more or less doomed the species to extinction. So anything different seems great to me! :)

Be careful what you wish for.

Says someone living better than an ancient Egyptian pharaoh.

Get off social media and the world is suddenly less dystopian.

That is simply a result of evolution as a species. We have oddly moved beyond where we potentially needed to be as a species for the financial benefit of a few and now we are reversing in quality of life due to the focus being on financial gain. Western citizens live a more selfish and worse life overall in terms of individual wealth, buying power, job availability, overall health, than say 20/30 years ago.

We definitely have problems, but I'd check those stats.

When you do that, you see something interesting. There are three things, the "three devils" as I heard one article call them, that are largely responsible for the perceived decline vs 20-30 years ago: the cost of housing, health care, and college tuition. Of those housing is the worst because it's the most universally unavoidable.

Ignore housing, health care, and college tuition, and think about it...

Individual wealth: vastly higher, especially if you include technological growth and what's possible today and what you can buy today for the same $$$.

Buying power: similar in many areas, slightly lower in energy but made up for by vast efficiency increases (e.g. I drive an EV that costs less than $10 to charge in my garage), slightly lower for groceries but a lot of that is self-inflicted. Vote, people.

Job availability: mixed, and very much depends on whether you compare to a recession period or a boom period.

Overall health: mixed.

Firstly, I won't ignore,what in the US the two biggest expenses, healthcare and housing and in the rest of the world, housing. It's a life essential that in most first world countries is becoming a scarce resource that many have to fight for. The ability to own your own dwelling is disappearing due to wages not keeping up with inflation.

Again, buying power, it would be less of an issue if wages kept up with inflation of the key products, aka housing. The largest item someone will buy is a home and that's reduced in quality.

The second most important thing for most people, is a job, and as I said, in most industries they have not matched with inflation. Therefore those today are working the same but earning a lot less for it. That is with or without a recession.

You may be able to theoretically consume more due to value decreasing of products but that's countered by the above. Likewise individual wealth, is just that, individual. Not everyone is doing better, most aren't, and we need a society where all are doing ok, rather than some doing great and some not.

(That EV costs more to begin with even with subsidies, and that disposable of the batteries are gigantic drain on resources. We still need to move to public transport.)

In most of Europe we don't really have problems with the #2 and #3. Cost of housing can still be tricky in major cities though.

I am not sure if that is the main value add. I have repeatedly heard that taking responsibility and being on the hook for the decisions (even if AI hands you the decision and all the research and homework that went into it) is the most important feature.

I guess starting with and/or developing a good network is one of the main ways they can gain the confidence for taking responsibility.

I have yet to see a CEO actually take responsibility for anything. Its always some hand-wavey talk about strategy and unexpected decline in sales. Never once was it "I messed up."

I have, on the other hand, seen boards pile all the blame onto the C-Suite. Seems easy enough to pile the blame on an AI.

I haven't been directly involved with any large company CEOs, but the CEOs of smaller companies I have worked with have frequently been constantly dealing with responsibilities from many decisions they took (or didn't block). Some have personality traits that hide the pool of concerns beneath the surface. And a couple were genuinely taking the life in tourist mode (oblivious to any and all concerns beyond the very next steps).

The "AI CEO" problem is not fundamentally different from self driving car responsibility problems. You need a big entity to be on the hook (financially and legally) if you are really going for lowered responsibility on the decision machinery. I think it can work though (but with a LOT of effort), and that might be an interesting startup idea (we provide 90% of the CEO work via AI, you be in control of the remaining 10%, and responsible for maybe 20% of it; our "insurance" covers the other 80% of the responsibility).

> they can't have Top Secret Meetings where a merger or acquisition is discussed

This actually seems completely doable for a properly configured LLM. There will probably be a platform in the future where companies can setup LLM to discuss business deals with other companies' LLMs and bring the resulting proposals to the human leadership. Every morning the CEO gets an email about the 3 most promising potential deals that were discussed, a summary of the big picture with TBD details highlighted, and a link to the transcript of the conversation. Plausibly the potential deal is with a company the CEO had never heard about or dealt with.

AIs have to breakthrough the threshold of controlling an important company first before it starts to matter

How does that work when they're both using Claude? Does it negotiate with itself?

Why not? They'll have significant differences in prompting and will both "want" to win.

And why dont we wear our pants on our heads and a shirt for pants?

You’d also get CEO optimization, getting them to talk about <buzzword> and how the entire company is now a <buzzword>-first business.

Network issue. If we could replace all meatbag CEOs by AI CEOs, then this wouldn't be an issue. Communication and deal making would be vastly faster and more efficient.

Meatbags can still be employed in this limited capacity, surely.

>Because meatbag CEOs need to know that they are just as vulnerable to this sort of thing as their employees they so callously discard.

True! And true all day long

The AI could appear on video to do physical networking

CEO, the first AI, soulless automatons that do the programmers biding√π¶£.<\

Can the AI CEO hire a consultant or lawyer to take care of this stuff?

Yes, any other type of psychopath or sociopath would work

Why should any of that be a secret? We don't have to give companies rights that normal people do not have. If there is money to be made, let two AIs discuss it. CEOs are way too corrupt and way too overpaid to be trusted. local AI wiped out one of my harddrives trying to resize it. That is less damage than a CEO can do. AI is safer than a human CEO.

If we restored the 1950s tax code that discouraged mergers and kept CEOs from grifting, everything you were concerned about stops happening. Businesses were way more honest when there are thousands of local and regional competitors. Federal tax cuts let CEOs merge everything.

CEO, sure, but middle manager ?

... unless/until all CEOs are replaced with AI.

> To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth.

Speaking as someone who has worked at multiple companies all the way from IC to team lead and even up to senior manager with a global team:

Almost every job at every level has some version of "ok, what's the flowchart for this". People assume this is for tech jobs but they would be surprised that it's true for managerial roles as well.

e.g. you have a poor performer then you run through this checklist:

1. is it an issue with the work being given?

2. is it an issue with another co-worker?

3. are they having a family issue?

4. it's a family issue, see if you can get details

5. oh, it's a sick parent? then implement the sick parent policy e.g. more flexible work hours, reduced work load, check in with them weekly till things improve etc

Where the human part comes in is where you have some combination of the below:

- event no one at the company has seen before

- the above requires discussions amongst humans to figure out

- those humans have to talk to other humans outside the company

examples at two levels might be (both for hurricane Sandy):

a. SREs have to deal with datacenters that don't have diesel

b. HR has to deal with critical employees that have houses that were swept away

I guess an AI could propose solutions to the above but it's a human that would actually make them happen (plus humans are more resilient to power outages).

The way you have expressed it there are optimized workflows not only the managerial/executive, administrative, content producing set of workers, but in almost every profession, encoded in beaurocracy, checklist, best practices and culture: doctors, care workers, lawyers, policing ...

The question is how well language models have internalized the optimal decision pathway and mitigating strategies to deviating circumstances. What data do they have to be trained on? If an AI defeats the best Go players in the world, surely it is a good question whether they can exceed in games with large unknowns such as business administration.

As mentioned somewhere else in this thread, the moral and ethical layers is where some of the challenges of these system can be found.

That ends up going in the DeepMind philopsophy of making AI, rather than the OpenAI philosophy. DeepMind makes AI that can defeat the best human Go players, OpenAI makes LLMs that are much more versatile but struggle with finishing a chess match without making illegal moves, never mind winning.

The other question on my mind: Cases where we have known decision pathways is exactly what the expert systems of the 70s and 80s were about. And from my understanding there were some successes, but we mostly found that it doesn't scale. Both encoding optimal decisions and encoding the decision space of things that can happen are huge challenges. LLMs might be genuinely better here, because they can just make things up as they go along, but they are also difficult to control

Makes sense re Deepmind. I also guess it is easier to train an AI using Deepmind approach on the Starcraft 2, Go, or other more closed systems than in the rather open business world with all those rules that need to be interpreted by a human judge in case of problems.

Good point re expert systems. I need to look up what actually made them fail, or how they are not scaling.

Have you been working in the space?

> I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs

I have the opposite opinion. I've never been a CEO, and have intentionally avoided any sort of manager/C-level opportunities at all the various companies I've worked specifically because they require a lot of effort at personnel management, investor relationships, customer relationships, and generally things requiring having to talk to people.

That kind of thing just can't be replaced by a chat bot.

Exactly. Being a good CEO means reading the body language of your programmers so you can tell when they need support. It means communicating competence to investors and customers. It means making complex decisions with incomplete input, a lot of the time deep intuitions are required. It means having the good sense of judgement. Part of the time you are tyrant, part of the time you are parent, part of the time you are psychologist, mentor, master, healer, empath, judge and jury, and the most important part : is knowing that ALL of this is REQUIRED to be human actions and a little text input spitting out (even under ideal conditions - excellent) quality text to the above is definitely not going to work because every good CEO knows that its 50% the message you deliver, and 50% the delivery that matters.

And also being a technical founder with 20 years coding experience, I dont think AI can replace programmers for a set of different but equally valid reasons.

That's funny when you said that a CEO reads the body language of programmers. CEOs and high executives don't even bother looking at you!

I know this is mostly true at huge companies, but having spent my career at various "small" corporations, with maybe a few thousand employees total (and only ~50 of which were in IT). I was always surprised when the CEO knew names of people like me, the lowly developer 5 layers below them on the org chart, but beyond that, remembered the last conversation we had, or an interest we might have shared (golf, hiking, travel, etc.).

Even as a temporary consultant, at a company for only a couple of months, I remember seeing the CEO walk the hallway, greeting every single person on the way between a meeting room and the bathroom. I can barely remember my family member's names, or the last thing we talked about, let alone have the memory space for all that information to seem kind and courteous to "low level" employees.

In my entire career, I've never worked at a behemoth-sized company, though, so my experience has been much more "intimate" environments, and primarily in consulting firms or satellite offices away from the main HQ (even by only a couple blocks some times). So everyone in the office knew each other.

I worked at a 10,000 person company ~15y ago. I was a lowly employee at the time; just a run of the mill Research Analyst writing code in SAS. I got on the elevator w/the CEO, said hello, and he knew exactly who I was and what I did.

Two important grounding items for me when I went into management and my career accelerated:

1. Take the worst boss I ever had (coincidentally at the same company) and make sure that I do the exact opposite of everything they did when leading others.

2. Mirror the actions of that CEO and make sure I remember every single person and what they did; it leaves a lasting impression on people.

How many CEOs actually do this? Can't say I've ever met one example of this outside startups.

> 2. Mirror the actions of that CEO and make sure I remember every single person and what they did; it leaves a lasting impression on people.

I had a physics prof ~20 years ago who made a point of memorizing the names of every one of his intro physics students by the second week.

No I didnt, I said "A good CEO" you missed the GOOD qualifier, and then immediately described a bad CEO

A good CEO according to the market, which is what counts in the US, is one that drives up the valuation of a company and increases profit in a mature company. It has nothing to do with personal interaction as most of us would prefer.

Well then you and I differ - I certainly dont turn to the market to define what is good, I guess thats what happens when you worship money, or are operating on the engineers fallacy where you ignore things that are hard to quantify numerically (e.g. empathy)

Who needs people skills if all the employees are agents?

Because in that situation you still have to interact with humans in customers, governments, other companies, investors and all the other places?

Yes, I agree. I think what people are maybe not considering is that while the aspects of the job can technically be automated, them being performed by a human cannot. As a human, you get special privileges. You can get more information out of people, you can be persuasive, you can be charming, you can compromise.

I think nobody would accept their manager being an LLM, and that's the issue. They want a real person they can talk to and see eye-to-eye with. It's the same all the way up to CEOs.

Sure you can have the automated CEO, but who will want to work with them? Won't they just... treat them like a stupid robot, like how we treat computers? Treat them as a tool to accomplish their own motivations? I mean, I never consider if I'm hurting my keyboard when I mash away. So how would an AI CEO actually work, without at least SOME fleshy face behind in front of it?

> I think nobody would accept their manager being an LLM

this depends heavily on what is easier to do: social engineering or prompt engineering.

Having been an engineer and then a founder (and CEO), neither can be automated. Both require organizational work to be effective, and developer productivity is so profitable in an outsized way that you'd always just hire more if you could, even if they were all 10x as productive (maybe this changes at some scale).

I'd have loved for an AI to assist with a few things as a CEO but we would have probably just shipped faster and it would have created even more pressure for board communication, customer calls, design partnerships, legal discussions, compliance, etc.

The idea that AI is coming after leadership is truly laughable. The idea that it's coming after some engineering jobs is a bit more likely to me, but I think many will actually be more valuable.

> Having been an engineer and then a founder (and CEO), neither can be automated

Can it be fully hands-off? No. But I think, as will all things, their both subject to the rise of the "technician"s. A mechanic doesn't change your brakes or flush your oil, a technician does. You don't see a doctor, you see a nurse practitioner and an MD just signs off. All the work that used to be done by someone with schooling to learn how to do it is just done by a technician that learned how to use the tools without the critical thinking of the expert, but with an expert somewhere available if needed.

There's a scene in Breaking Bad, where after having shadowed Walter White as he ran a cook - one of the henchmen makes a batch insisting that it's just following a recipe (to which Walt describes all the things that could go wrong if the operator didn't understand the nuances).

American's can't help but try to automate our jobs away. We create systems, recipes, toolkits etc trying to minimize the amount of actual thinking required to do anything. Honestly, I think that's one of the reasons software quality has gone down across the board. We're already so many abstractions removed from doing the actual work, that most developers don't even know how to debug the systems beyond the highest layer. I've seen the rise of bootstrap devs, and jQuery devs, and react devs, and now it's vibe coders and harness engineers or whatever the latest things are. My examples are dev centric because that's my chosen role, but just look to say Amazon and their use of AI for performance evals and terminations. It effects management less technical jobs too.

> Can it be fully hands-off? No. But I think, as will all things, their both subject to the rise of the "technician"s. A mechanic doesn't change your brakes or flush your oil, a technician does. You don't see a doctor, you see a nurse practitioner and an MD just signs off. All the work that used to be done by someone with schooling to learn how to do it is just done by a technician that learned how to use the tools without the critical thinking of the expert, but with an expert somewhere available if needed.

This already describes how CEOs work though. CEOs aren't experts in every part of the company, they sign off on things and delegate, and manage communications etc. There's very little additional room to delegate because the role already is extremely delegation heavy.

> developer productivity is so profitable in an outsized way that you'd always just hire more if you could, even if they were all 10x as productive (maybe this changes at some scale).

Definitely. Software is a digital arms race between companies so they’ll just keep expanding. I’m sure at some scale that breaks down but we are far from that point. My lumberyard, a few miles away from one of ASML’s US facilities, still runs its POS and inventory tracking on old DOS machines. In a decade they could probably make more money selling them as antiques.

A lot of the value (compensation cost) of having a single leader is that the leader becomes a critical, irreplacable bottleneck and silo of information. AI can solve that by removing the bottleneck.

Genuine question: am I missing some sarcasm here? When you say a CEO has to "talk to people", and then say it can't be done by a chat bot. That's literally the only thing a chat bot can do.

Every person all the way down the chain thinks everyone else can be replaced by AI, but have some good reason that they themselves (or their role) can’t be.

Personally I think that almost any role can be augmented by AI, but very few can be outright replaced that we’re not already very close to an RPA bot replacing them anyway.

Then you consider that they might be able to reduce headcount because of productivity increases. But why wouldn’t they want to use the budget they already have for these newly more productive people and get even more work done overall?

There are some exceptions, like maybe you can be entirely rid of some L1 support.

> But why wouldn’t they want to use the budget they already have for these newly more productive people and get even more work done overall?

For all the same reasons many companies are eager to cut labor costs whenever possible. There can be a variety of bottlenecks to scaling and it's often not as simple as hire more people to make more profit, even if you have extra capital available.

Is a client or investor going to have a conversation with an AI CEO and then negotiate funding?

VC: "Hi, I'll offer you $3.75 for 95% equity and a load bearing position on the board"

CEO Bot: "You're absolutely right. Agreed!"

That's the smoking gun—investor relations are all about human connection seams and load-bearing relationships.

Especially in investor relationships and customer relationships, the talking itself is often not the important part. Yes, you need to align on terms and goals. But the interpersonal component is arguably more important. You need to project that you are a trustworthy partner with compatible goals. And being present as the CEO (or other manager) also shows a resource investment into the future partnership. Your time is valuable, and you took some of that time and dedicated it to this meeting. A chatbot can't do that

What you're referring to is "talking at" people. But "talking to" people usually involves more than just moving your mouth (which chat bots can't, btw).

Chat bots are pretty terrible, usually.

They're are getting better. There is ongoing research on how to make them more manipulative and better at negotiating.

The scifi story Manna starts with management being automated: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

It's a different type of soulless hell, and it's a good read if you haven't already.

Sorry, the site doesn't seem to resolve. Are you sure that the URL is correct?

Must use the Internet Archive now: https://web.archive.org/web/20260725174355/https://marshallb... The author died.

Thank you for the backup link! I hadn't known he had passed, and I didn't expect the link to fail. I first read the story back in 2008 or so, and it's been one of those works that lodged itself in my mind so it's sad to hear he died.

Worth knowing how he died and more about his life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Brain

Goodness, what a find! Same here.-

It's previously visited for me and still comes up on Google for the story, so I guess the site is just down unfortunately.

I think also it's extremely hard to fairly judge high level decisions whose outcomes may not materialize for a very long time. This makes it genuinely hard for humans to get better (and one gets the impression that most of them don't) with more experience at the helm of a large and complex org. But it also means that it's hard to evaluate or train a machine on the task. You can maybe automate getting something plausible out, but how would you know if it was _good_ in a timely way? So how do you review a configuration or prompt change in this repo?

> You can maybe automate getting something plausible out, but how would you know if it was _good_ in a timely way?

Contrary to the other guy, the answer is accountability, either personal, or higher-level systems like competition and ultimately Darwinism.

By using historic data.

You should strictly segregate training and testing data, to be sure that your model has internalised decision-making principles. [0]

It is definitionally true that any given moment in history is unprecedented, and that old thinking is invalidated by paradigm shifts. But not every single variable is randomised. The launch of the PC didn't embarrass every executive, for example.

0: https://www.owlposting.com/p/an-ml-drug-discovery-startup-tr...

> After all what's the difference between a bot showing a layoff notice at 5am or an AI generated message/video from a human doing the very same thing.

Of course, any well-trained AI should be aware that the proper way to handle a layoff notice is to send it to your wall-mounted fax machine.

> To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth.

I disagree for entirely different reasons than others; I think you can't replace a CEO with AI for the same reason you can't replace a king with AI. It's a title, not a job. You can't even replace middle management with AI - not because it won't (eventually) be able to do the job "just as well," but that the job is largely to take the blame for failure, not to do things.

These people like to take credit for being coordinators, just like property owners like to pretend that that's the same thing as a property manager, but they're different functions. One is a title, and one is a duty. If the person with the title takes up another duty, it's by choice. In the case of both property owners and business owners it's buying themselves a job, often (especially in the case of property owners) because they are in debt up to their eyeballs and can't afford another employee.

CEOs are people who select from and approve choices that are handed to them by experts. You hire and fire them to reassure stockholders. Their only real job is to make complex, convincing excuses for their performance.

The only real bottleneck for self-organized discord work groups becoming more mainstream is the need for a central point of contact for legal things, money things, and inter/intra communication things. I see 0 reason why there couldn’t be a system for distributing all of this work at some point.

If you want to add a feature compliant with X Y Z, you need forms A B C and to implement I J K. Put it on the board for whoever’s interested and when it’s finished, add it to the set of things you’re compliant with. If there’s disagreement about how it should be implemented, elect a tiebreaker. Have automatic actions and alerts based on what you’re compliant with and what you intend to do. etc

All this needs to work is the ability to reliably look stuff up by how you want to change the organization, and pattern match on previous approaches and your evolving situations. If you aren’t inventing anything new this is exactly what LLMs are for.

I strongly disagree with this take. AI does not have the theory of mind to manage complex social environments, and AI does not have the context and intuition and experience required to replace a CEO, any more than a random external worker could take over their job for a day.

> I strongly disagree with this take. AI does not have the theory of mind to manage complex social environments

Does Musk have a complex theory of mind to manage his employees, or does he just have a brutally efficient organizational strategy and gets rid of anything that doesn't fit? I think it's more the latter, and an LLM can absolutely do that.

> context and intuition and experience required to replace a CEO

Show me the CEO of a major tech firm who is accomplishing all this?

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/29/claude-opus-5-became-downr...

Leadership, Management and being a Boss are not the same things. You need a solid mix of all three to be a successful executive. Cut throat, self aggrandizing, and a bit of a selfish asshole are all traits that lead to positive outcomes in these roles.

> Cut throat, self aggrandizing, and a bit of a selfish asshole are all traits that lead to positive outcomes in these roles.

Press X to doubt.

In my experience, with those types of leaders, success happens despite them not because of them. Someone in a leadership role may have built a strong team around them that can counteract their own toxic behaviours, and they may try to take credit for the successes of their team, but they aren't bringing out the best in that team. Toxic workplaces often start with toxic leadership.

The problem I think is that each company usually has one CEO, so automation/higher productivity cannot lead to cutting CEO jobs by 50% or sth. Unless people with AI now can be CEOs in multiple companies at once, as they do not need to spend as much time in a single company now that they have AI? Or maybe with the help of AI they can take also different executive roles at the same time, as in now with AI why should one have a separate CEO and CTO when with AI one can do both jobs at once in the same amount of time one would do only one without AI?

People do sit on multiple boards, so replace the board with multiple AIs?

You can have one human in a board supervising the AIs, or one human in multiple boards even, and cut the rest of the positions.

Automating the c-suite doesn’t save you money by cutting headcount, it saves you money by reducing salaries. Having a decently competent AI executive would put a lot of downward pressure on the insane benefits packages these folks get

"I'm not running out of issues. They just keep getting more obscure." Totally agree, For me it's becouse AI takes in places I've never explored before.

Most leadership, let's say 95% of them, they are super easy to replace. An AI bot will do a better job, and with much lower compensation. Better return for your investment.

Good leadership is very hard to replace. Think about Apple without Steve Jobs.

I'd argue that those CEO-type (leadership) positions are a lot about relationships which AI's aren't going to be able to replicate.

This is a terrible undesrtanding of leadership

also at the end you as ceo have to sell to other humans. no human will buy from an ai

Having worked at all sorts of roles, I would say that the owner is the only one not replaceable.

In terms of 'automating' Leadership, it's self-evident that Agentic AI is more than capable of inferring context and providing insight based on its significant business administration and management corpus. From this it can suggest actions, follow-up via a plethora of mediums and APIs, and generate up to the minute reporting on a variety of KPIs.

In terms of replacing the function of a Leader, however, the reality is closer to that old joke about the Theoretical Physicist and the farmer - "I have a solution, but it only works for a spherical cow in a vacuum".

The last thing I'd trust to navigate the Realpolitik of modern globalised business is a language model distilled by an Individual Contributor. When Agentic AI navigates moral hazard, it does so as a cosplayer at best - the final actualisation of Dramaturgical sociology.

In fact, Erving Goffman's original Theatrical Metaphors from his 1959 opus 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life' map almost directly to the ludicrous symbiotic relationship defined by impression management on both sides of the prompt: AI systems aligning themselves by aping linguistic cues and saccharine affirmations, while users are effectively required to rephrase or reframe prompts to the point of absurdity in order to elicit the desired response, or otherwise navigate guardrails.

Idealized organizations are not perfect. They are perfectly pathological. The top tier are effectively sociopaths operating under conditions of serious moral hazard. If Agentic AI becomes an able replacement, everyone dies.

https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_...

You want to see innovation in layoff notices? There are some areas where innovation is not a good idea.

https://fortune.com/2025/11/19/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-says...

Top CEO agrees

> To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs

Of course you do. Which is why you won’t get anywhere. It’s always funny to watch though.

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