Why does it say “threaten”?
It just offers a service. Googlemail doesn’t threaten to provide me with an email address. A gardener doesn’t threaten to maintain and tend to your garden.
Do you want Delamain?
Because that’s how you get Delamain.
yes, actually i would prefer that.
As a shareholder, I approve of replacing Executives with AI.
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.
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 are the most expensive piece of the workforce by far, especially when you consider their relative measurable productivity
They went mask-off when working from home saved money vs return to office. It’s about power.
I’ve read that one of the jobs most suited to takeover by AI are CEOs.
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…
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.
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.
Right. Parody.
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.
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.
It depends on the country and the documents used to create the company.
US, UK, Australia & NZ (and probably Canada but I don’t know) have fundamentally the same (not identical but pretty close) corporate governance laws.
Yes a corporation is a separate legal entity; that was established in case law back in the 19thC in the UK (Salomon V Salomon), it does not however means that individuals are always protected, you can “lift the corporate veil” in specific circumstances (negligence fraud etc). IOW a corporation can be sued but sometimes the individuals inside the corporation can also be sued
I’m not aware of any laws in the above countries that require the presence of an explicitly named CEO role, however all the standard laws require governance of the organisation through the directors and via directors & shareholders resolutions. An individual company can specify a structure in the documents used to create it (variously called things like a constitution or memorandum and articles of association depending your country/state) mandating that certain roles need to exist within the coy but that is optional and not standard.
To address your actual point as opposed to the law, the CEO is an operational decision making functional role. If someone is making strategic decisions whether their title is Managing Director, CEO or Chief Stupidity Officer it doesn’t matter, it’s a functional role not a legal one. The legal buck stops with the directors regardless of who or what is making decisions for the company, however if there is a live person in the CEO role they can be sued on the “lift corporate veil” bases (fraud negligence malfeasance etc). If the CEO has acted within their bounds and in good faith then any issues sit with the directors (note I’m trying to condense a massive list of if ands and buts into a pithy sentence, there’s a zillion exceptions but that’s the broad rule).
So yes, the board could legally put an AI in place and direct it to run the company. If it makes bad or illegal decisions that liability rests with the directors.
If the AI oversteps its delegated authority is possibly the one area where it could get legally interesting. I would expect the directors to be held liable for any decision the AI made even if it executed something it was explicitly told not to as it is reasonably foreseeable (by anyone with a functioning brain cell anyway) that that could happen and oversight is needed. I could also see a board dragging the AI provider to court to try and hold them as being accountable (don’t think they’d win, but I can see there being a lawsuit)
EDIT some grammar/punctuation and a couple of wording tweaks for readability
See now this is interesting. I believe there is a difference between bad decisions and illegal decisions and what individuals can be held liable for. As long as a company using this “CEO ai can demonstrate reasonable frameworks were in place around the decisions it was acting upon, such as “hmm maybe we won’t eat the first born child of every customer or let’s not spend the companies full cash reserves on crack”, I think there are protections from liability.
I believe there is a difference between bad decisions and illegal decisions
This is self evidently true, or I’d be in jail for the relationships I had in my teens.
and what individuals can be held liable for.
To be liable you need to have broken a law. So yes a person, or an AI, can make stupid but legal decisions, for which no legal liability accrues.
Not too sure where you’re going with this though
This simply came out of me challenging the assertion in a comment higher up stating that a company still needed a CEO/person to be held liable for what the LLM could do. I didn’t think it was that black and white.
So board of directors are liable if the company itself isnt directly liable is the short answer, directors can hold joint liability along with the company
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.
Well, for all the good that has done, might as well replace them anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry guys.
It might sound like a dream, but these replacements aren’t happening as long as the shareholders can’t blame the AI when the company does something bad. They don’t want to end up in prison.
Yeah. Just look at all the CEOs currently in prison!
I was talking about the shareholders.
If they blame the CEO, they can just fire them and pay a fine.
If the fault is on a shareholder, they can’t be fired and will be completely to blame, so they might go to prison.
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 classic…
Middle-manager: We have 3 options, but only enough resources to finish 1, which one should we prioritize?
CEO: These are all great! I look forward to seeing the final version of all 3 next week.
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.
Why parody? Try it.
https://overpaid.lol/ for the people curious
It actually makes a lot of sense
