The people in this thread coming to the defense of their CEOs sound like Tom Smykowski in Office Space desperately trying to save his job: “I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people.”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo

If you’ve ever taken a sales or business or networking course, and seen the people that take the advice literally and act like creepy wooden weirdos, you know why. Business “skill” is intangible, partially luck obviously but partially “game” that you can’t just systematize. It’s the same reason you can’t automate sales. An AI ceo would just be the composite of all the lame business advice you find on the internet - like a lot of wannabe CEOs that also don’t succeed.

You might as well ask why people don’t use AI pickup coaches.

I don't even think we need ChatGPT or anything for this. Instead, just create an n8n job that runs nightly that sends a company-wide email that says "we are continuing to strive to implement AI into our application". Maybe add a thing talking about how share price going down is actually a blessing in disguise, depending on how the market is doing, obviously.

Don't steal this idea it's mine I'm going to sell it for a million dollars.

I can't think of a job that is less automatable.

The entire job is almost entirely human to human tasks: the salesmanship of selling a vision, networking within and without the company, leading the first and second line executives, collaborating with the board, etc.

What are people thinking CEOs do all day? The "work" work is done by their subordinates. Their job is basically nothing but social finesse.

It is easy to make the mistake of believing CEOs are automatable based on their public speaking: interviews, earning calls, conference talks. With a rare exception (cough Musk) CEOs communicate in a very sterilized PR-speak, coached and vetted by PR, media relations, and legal counsels, and usually stick to facts or not very controversial opinions. That part of the job is pretty replaceable with a well-trained LLM.

The real job is done behind the curtain. Picking up key people based on their reputation, knowledge, agency, and loyalty. Firing and laying off people. Organizational design. Cutting the losses. Making morally ambiguous decisions. Decisions based on conversations that are unlikely to ever be put into bytes.

CEO's at least in the USA have multiple legal obligations under federal law. Can legal obligations be delegated legally to automation? Has this been tested yet, specific to legal obligations related to the board? Any corporate lawyers wish to chime in?

I was a CEO for thirteen years. For the hard CEO skills, AI is perfectly suited for the job; even more than it would be for specialist roles.

For the soft CEO skills, not so much.

Not that that's a deal-breaker. I have a vision of an AI CEO couched as a "strategic thought partner," which the wet-CEO just puppets to grease the skids of acceptance among the employees.

I'd fully trust an AI CEO's decision making, for a predictable business, at least. But some CEOs get paid a lot (deservedly so) because they can make the right decisions in the thick fog of war. Hard to get an AI to make the right decision on something that wasn't in the training corpus.

Still, business strategy isn't as complex as picking winners in the stock market.

https://archive.ph/uiRyN

CEOs who build great, long-lasting companies would be very hard to replicate. But CEOs who make money for stockholders at the expense of everything else seem like the type of thing that would be much easier to replicate. As others have commented, replacing the people skills of a CEO might be difficult. But if the CEO's job is to strip the company of assets and cash out for the owners, people skills are kind of a hindrance at that point.

You don't automate jobs, you automate tasks. In the very near future any CEO worth even a fraction of their compensation will automate most of their day to day tasks, and will use AI to better accomplish things that are currently hard. Certainly to some degree the optimal skillset for a good CEO will transform, but the role will remain.

Some CEOs are obviously extremely skilled at marshalling large organisations in the successful pursue of business goals, while the rest derive most of their value from sharing a job title with the first group.

Because the people supplying the automation would extract the surplus that otherwise goes to the ceo?

I'm deeply skeptical of CEOs being "built different" like some people are arguing here. If Elon can be CEO of three companies and the founder of a couple more while also finding time to tweet 50+ times a day, have a failed and embarrassing stint in trying to optimize the federal government, and get K-holed at parties then the demands of the job can't be that rigorous.

If anything, I would argue that the strategic decisions actually can be automated/performed via broader consensus. With that handled, all that's left is the cartel that CEOs have invented to justify their exhorbant pay packages.

How expensive something is is a very poor starting point for what we should attempt to automate with nascent technology that still has a pretty high miss rate

It’s not entirely irrelevant to the commercial case but you really need to start with technical feasibility and how resilient the job is to mistakes.

And something that is high risk, high leverage and very softskills/experience driven is a bad place for AI imo

Anthropic‘s shenanigans with their AI vendor should illustrate how far we are from credible AI CEOs

My impression is that most of the value a CEO provides comes from a combination of their existing social network and their ability to interface socially with other companies. The day to day work described in the article is not where the value comes from.

It would be an interesting experiment to promote an executive assistant to CEO though.

We just posted a memorial for Louis Gerstner, the CEO that turned around IBM. I think reading about Louis Gerstner gives a pretty good example of why this would be a bad idea.

My business experience is that company culture is very important to a company’s success and I’m just doubtful that this can be created through AI.

A hundred thousand posts on HN about how you can, without hesitation, replace your network security team with AI, and you can see the flood of CEOs (or CEO wannabes) nodding and murmuring about saving costs. A single post about CEOs being automated and all of a sudden it’s all about “intangible human relation skills” and “AI couldn’t possibly” and “but my network of angel investors and other CEOs”.

I swear there’s a joke or cautionary tale here somewhere about “first they came for..” or something along those lines. The phrasing escapes me.

Maybe the problem isn’t that you can’t automate a CEO, it’s that the actual tangible work just isn’t worth as much as some companies pay for it, and this thread it touching a few too many raw nerves.

Well, either way it’s hilarious.

There are CEO affect studies. Seems like the CEO effect on company performance is about 11.5%, see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104898432...

In my opinion, a lot of strategic work can be automated - and results would actually be better. Why? Because the strategic management agent would most likely follow a scientific process and make small bets instead of investing millions in initiatives without having a clear signal.

What you cannot automate is the human contact. Trust between humans. Enlighting the fire that burns inside you inside others. CEOs aren't necessarily the best strategic thinkers but they're very good in dealing with people and they are high-agency people.

Maybe first get the automated vending machines to work properly, and then revisit this question to find what tasks that allows to be peeled away from the role?

CEOs usually follow the worse forms of human collaboration known to our species: totalitarianism, dictatorships, monarchies, and centrally planned messes.

Anything that removes the power of CEOs and gives it to the worker should be highly encouraged. Economic democracy is the final frontier of human empowerment and giving workers then means to have democratic control over the economy can only unlock more human potential, not less.

Because despite appearences, being a CEO is an actual complex job that AI is not remotely competitive at

Because being CEO in huge part means having connections with the right people.

Who gets the final signing authority and can be held liable for specific mistakes or crimes commissioned by the company if there is no CEO?

You're Absolutely Right!

This should be marked as being from 2023.

If CEOs are automated, i.e. eliminated, then all decisions, popular and unpopular will be attributed to boards. It's related to other CxO as well. Who'd you blame for insulin price increase over years if CFO was a script parametrized by the board?

You could replace all of the arguments against automating CEOs with the same arguments against automating allocation of capital. In both these cases people are imagining their work to be more subtle and ineluctably human than, for example, the work of doctors and lawyers. Sure, buddy. Keep telling yourself.

Even if this did happen there would no doubt be some sweet-talking schmuck with half a college degree and connections to all the other rich and powerful (likely through their dad) claiming credit for everything the LLM did.

I've seen some truly great CEOs from time to time. I knew what they did.

I have zero idea what most CEOs that I've worked for do ... and the seem to want it that way.

If CEOs can be replaced, shouldn't founders be also (who are often CEOs)? What about all levels of leadership? Why can't AIs just run full companies autonomously?

Love the idea, but whence the training data? Not as readily available as billions of jpegs, lines of code, and audio files. Any clever ideas to source it?

https://archive.is/uiRyN

CEO is the most over valued position in human history aside from literal royalty.

Last year's joke is next year's reality.

Every year I feel a bit less crazy in my silly armchair speculation that the Second Renaissance from the Animatrix is a good documentary. If AI "takes over" it will be via economic means and people will go willingly until they have gradually relinquished control of the world to something alien. (Landian philosophers make the case that hyperstitional capitalism has already done this)

I would take the over that this will happen sooner than later -- when it's proven to make a lot of money to have an AI CEO, suddenly everyone will change their tune and jump on the bandwagon with dollar signs in their eyes, completely ignoring what they are giving up.

Except unlike e.g. the metaverse/cryptocurrency bandwagon of yesteryear, there's no getting off.

As a founder/CEO who started as a programmer, I have been running my second company for 15 years. I am not great, but I got the company to be sizable and profitable.

1. I will take five automated CEOs. If I can split my company into five distinct companies (one per product), it would be amazing. We are splitting the company into two to streamline focus on different/incompatible industries, and I am dreading the process of finding another CEO. It is very, very hard.

2. I know a lot of CEOs. It helps. I didn't know a single one when I started. It is no more a cult than my programmer's peer group was.

3. Did I tell you how hard it is to find a good CEO? It is VERY, VERY hard. Think of hiring a great product guy with agency to do whatever needs to be done, with people skills to attract talent, a sales drive, and a willingness to deal with finance & legal. Oh, and I am in the tech field, so I need him to be very hardcore technical. Your mileage might vary, but this is who I need. Anyone who has that is running their own companies. Oh, and the person has to have a proven track record. I cannot let someone unproven ruin the company and well-being of hundreds of employees and tens of thousands of customers.

4. I don't believe CEOs are special in any way other than that most other professionals are special. There are probably some underlying qualities, but they're all so different.

5. Some CEOs got there because they were lucky, but they didn't stay there for long because of luck. It is very, very simple to screw up as a CEO.

6. Growing someone within an organization to become a CEO is very hard. We are trying - giving some people more and more responsibilities, trying to involve them in more and more aspects of the organization. The filter is - repeatable success. You don't have to succeed all the time, but you have to succeed most of the time. Most people don't want the pressure, aren't interested in certain aspects, or are unsuccessful more often than they should.

7. Boards are not a cult as well; they don't have CEO's back. Boards are represented by investors (pension funds, wealthy individuals, etc.) - they will oust the CEO if the company's performance suffers. They are willing to pay a lot to the CEO because ... it is so hard to find a good CEO.

That's a role that would require AGI, we're not there yet.

if something goes wrong with that "automation" who takes the responsibility? as a shareholder are you comfortable with it? i am not.

This one? https://replaceyourboss.ai

For context, New Statesman is the premier British socialist magazine.

Whatever the merits of the argument here (and my bolshie side has also flippantly pushed it in the past) the motivation and thrust of the essay needs to be considered in that ideological grounding.

AI can’t even clean toilets.

The CEOs of the biggest corporations could absolutely be replaced... You don't even need an LLM, just a cron job that runs once a day and executes a script:

if (marketCrash) then sendEmailToGovernmentAskingForBailout();

Should say,”Soft skills are hugely expensive. Why not automate them?” Then you don’t need to read the article.

The article might be a modest proposal [1], but sooner or later we're going to have to answer questions like these.

An even more interesting one is: What will we reward?

We've been rewarding labor quantity, as well as quality via higher wages - as motivation and as incentives for more education. This reflected the productivity primacy of knowledge work in modern economies, but that might not be the case down the road.

We've also been rewarding capital. Originally this was a way for the elites to keep themselves in place (a.k.a. economic rents), but in modern times it's been more of an entrepreneurial incentive (a.k.a. economic profits.)

Without the economic profit rationale, there's no reason to reward capital accumulation. Only pro-profit decisions are good for society, pro-rent decisions are awful. If there's no profit to incentivize, capitalism is just bad all around.

If AI becomes a better profit decision-maker than an entrepreneur, any humans left in the loop are nothing but high-rollers gambling with everyone else's money.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

Should have (2023) in the title. This is an old post.

Also, I think it misses the critical point. C-suite executives operate under immense pressure to deliver abstract business outcomes, but the lack of clear, immediate feedback loops and well-defined success metrics makes their roles resistant to automation. AI needs concrete reward functions that executive decision-making simply doesn't provide.

And replace them with government bureaucrats?

It’s been tried before, it didn’t work out well.

A CEO is just a mascot without the goofy outfit.

This is precisely the same dilemma as self-driving cars. Who will be held accountable if something goes wrong? Who will be dragged into court by shareholders?

This article fundamentally misunderstands the role of a CEO.

The main job of CEOs is not decision making. 99% of company decisions are made below the level of CEO. For the ones that make it to CEO, the board tends to have final say.

It’s a leadership role where people interactions are the most important. The CEO sets the tone, gets people on the same page, and is the external face of the company.

It’s silly to think a robot can replace that.

(2021)

Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26943218

There is probably a point when there is enough capital and enough investors that you don't need a CEO or executives. The investors already take care of all the politics and business networking side of the company for free.

The investors can organize the government bailouts themselves. You don't need a CEO.

Misunderstanding why the CEO is paid so much.

If you've ever worked at a company that's a chaotic shitshow, you'll know how strong the effect of the CEO is - it always comes down to the guy at the top not being up to it.

The leverage of the role is enormous, and the strength of someone who can carry out this role well for a large company is sky high - not many such people in the world, and they only need one.

So the math all comes out very straightforward: even at obscene looking salaries, they're still a bargain.

Christine Carrillo's most recent company helps CEOs find executive assistants. So she had her executive assistant find executive assistants... sigh...

I'm constantly reminded about the 2000 election. Part of Al Gore's communications strategy was to constantly talk about the "top 1%". Now he wasn't wrong about this but interestingly there was a survey in 2000 that showed that 19% of people thought they were the top 1% and another 20% thought they would be someday.

This is how successful American propaganda is. 39% of people believed something that definitionally could never be true.

So you will find people who make average salaries defending the stratospheric salaries of CEOs because they believe they'll one day be the one benefitting or they've fallen for some sort of propaganda such as the myth of meritocracy or prosperity gospel.

Our entire economy is designed around exploiting working people and extracting all of their wealth to a tiny portion of the population. And we're reachign the point where the bottom 50% (if not more) have nothing left to exploit.

Ai and automation could be used to improve all of our lives. It isn't and it won't be. It'll be used to suppress wages and displace workers so this massive wealth transfer can be accelerated.

I get the point of the article. But those with the wealth won't let themselves be replaced by AI and seemingly the populace will never ask the question of why they can't be replaced until economic conditiosn deteriorate even further.

Inane Reddit crosspost.

Imagine an AI agent that ingests a ton of data from business analytics and then makes decisions, which are signed off by the company legal team.

Could be good, but could also be bad if it turns out the AI is able to be even more ruthless in how it treats its workforce.

The good news is that it doesn't need to be very accurate in order to beat the performance of most execs anyways.

> Why not automate them?

Because building psychopathic AI's is - at the moment - still frowned upon.

Can't read the paywalled article so i'm judginf from just a headline (not sure if it's sarcasm or actual opinion),

but as someone who has the honor of working witha really good ceo i can definitely say that you cannot automate them. maybe in some streamlined corporate machine like ibm or something, but not in a living growing company

Another article that starts from the false premise that AI is intelligent.