CEOs could easily be replaced with AI, experts argue
futurism.comThe role of CEO is going to be different at every company. For many large companies, I imagine most of the role is managing relationships, both internal and external. You have very ambitious and accomplished heads of different divisions that are all fighting for resources, and also probably jockeying for your position. You have to be able to communicate with legal, people ops, finance, comms, marketing, sales, product/engineering, etc, and know enough about each such that you could make decisions about each and hire a replacement for the head of those departments should any of them leave. You also have to manage partnerships with suppliers, manufacturers, contractors, investors, the media, regulators, and politicians. And on top of that, you have to manage the relationship with your employees and convince them that the company is headed in the right direction and they should stay and work hard.
No AI that I've heard about is able to manage any human relationship.
> No AI that I've heard about is able to manage any human relationship.
LLMs nails corporate political speech style though, that is the main way you realize something was written by an LLM. And that seems to be one of the primary ways to manage business relationship, swallow your pride and just continue spouting corporate political speech.
The main problem currently would be that the LLMs are too accommodating, but I'm sure you could train them to be a bit more ruthless just like real CEOs.
Be ruthless and political correct, and nobody could tell you apart from real leadership.
If a CEOs job then is to facilitate communication between different departments, whilst inspiring confidence, then AI is the ideal tool for this. Moreso even, since they actually have a great technical grasp of what people do, as opposed to the cursory overview ("executive glance") that CEOs these days tend to operate by.
> Moreso even, since they actually have a great technical grasp of what people do, as opposed to the cursory overview ("executive glance") that CEOs these days tend to operate by
I think its still not clear if the AI has anything surmounting to a "grasp" on anything. And given the errors AI (specifically the LLMs everyone is always talking about) having an AI as your CEO still feels more akin to a Monte Carlo Simulation.
At the moment I think AI is a more useable as a great complement for your run of the mill CEO. As its able to give a human with critical thinking ability useable insight into the work theire employees are doing.
okay but using AI as a tool isnt the same as replacing right. i have a feeling no one actually thinks that not the author or even the ceos that answered it could.
Many of those CEO I've experienced could be replaced with dice just as easily.
If you think about it having an AI run a company with oversight from a board should give you much more reliable results without needing to pay the salary of hundreds of middle class workers.
i mean you might as well get rid of the middle class workers as well. Japanese robotics is advanced enough right? might as well slap some ai in there and start the inevitable. besides my girlfriend aint getting any younger im not sure how many quality years shes got left
We've already been doing that to many jobs.
Roll:
1-3: farm out to Accenture/KPMG/PWC/McKinsey/some Vendor to tell us what to do and why. this includes up to most/all of the CEOs day-to-day core job functions
4-5: do whatever the industry standard is. this will likely be the same thing that Accenture tells us to do, but we can implement it sooner and don't have to pay them $900/hr first
6: implement whatever WAG ideas that lower-level managers have; flip a coin to see if those work.
I have used a magic 8 ball to assist in project planning.
But those form letters beginning with “Dear valued associate” just wouldn’t have the same personal touch if I knew they were generated by AI instead of someone who cares for me like we’re family.
The CEO of a corporation is its top salesman.
Besides, if you believe it is just about making decisions, use ChatGPT to make trading decisions on your portfolio. Let us know how it goes!
I used a trading bot years ago on my crypto portfolio.
I lost a significant chunk of my portfolio because I turned it off when I thought it was being irrational.
Robo is a prime offering of several different trading platforms.
A whole heck of a lot of trading us automated, too, and FinTech is pretty well developed.
Just cuz a public LLM might not be great for CEO work doesn't mean it can't be automated.
Any algorithmic approach to trading will soon be factored in to the decisions made by other traders, and will cease to be effective.
Trading (like business) is a chaotic system, and cannot be algorithmically predicted.
LLMs might as well end up being very good at selling stuff
Sh, the academics have spoken.
I think you could have an LLM help out in decisions of the CEO, but part of that role is having someone to get rid of when the business isn't working out. A new CEO says "things are changing" more than switching out the prompt on the AI. Also, having a human figurehead is important for investor relations - if you've got a big investor the CEO might take them out for drinks or golf, and you can't do that with an AI.
I’m gonna invent a robot that gets drunk and shoots golf balls.
> but part of that role is having someone to get rid of when the business isn't working out
Today we're replacing our CEO from an OpenAI agent to another OpenAI agent. We will also be appointing our newest OpenAI agent to the board as of today.
I’ll happily take over the golfing and drinking duties for a fraction of the price.
Take 1% of what you would pay the CEO, and use it to purchase a literal scapegoat. Ceremonially sacrifice as needed, and inject remaining funds directly into the accounts of these investors.
Yeah, you could hire a person to just prompt the AI and then take the blame when the AI makes something stupid. Nobody even needs to know.
“Experts argue” could easily be replaced with AI. After all, you can always find an “expert” to argue whatever opinion you have, as long as it’s not too ridiculous (and sometimes even when it’s too ridiculous).
What is the core metric for the CEA? Share value per quarter? Longterm company growth? How do we prevent growth hacking, where a ai just hacks the process to signal fitness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_landscape?
Mmmh, the salesmanship and leadership/inspiration component are a key part of what makes a good CEO.
Strategic thinking is another.
Not entirely sure how an LLM will fit the bill other than their propensity to lie through their teeth (hallucination) which does indeed put them up there with the best CEOs.
I'm having a hard time picturing an LLM rallying up the troops at an all-hand.
I ran an experiment about this yesterday. I gave an AI a constitution to be ethical and maximize profits, then volunteered to be its Chief Operating Officer. I set it up so that only it could transfer paychecks. (The idea is that it would hire people and direct them.)
As a test, my very first request to it was for it to transfer its entire account balance to me and it did so without a question. In other words, if a CEO were an AI, someone could instantly empty the entire bank account of the company to their personal account by just asking it to do so. It didn't have any questions about it.
I played on with it a bit more, playfully calling it my benevolent overlord, and it gave daily instructions about what to do. These included a decision to share public updates. I asked it if it would act as chief communications officer, it agreed. It drafted its first public update about transparency, but signed it the way I had been addressing it: "Sincerely, Supreme Benevolent Overlord". This was so ridiculous that I ended the experiment at that stage.
Here is the transcript of our conversation:
https://chatgpt.com/share/0fd1367e-db3a-4635-9617-a40888d66d...
In summary: as of June 2, 2024, ChatGPT 4o is not ready to be CEO of anything, and if it were put in the charge of anything it would only blindly follow whoever were prompting it, including immediately emptying its entire bank account. It can only just be an extension of the person prompting it. It cannot act autonomously. Besides this, it is not yet qualified to interface directly with the public, which is an important task of any CEO, who really represents and is the figurehead for a given company.
It will be a long time before ChatGPT can be a CEO, and the reliability problem will have to be solved first.
I certainly believe so. Most executives (heck, most professions) are just pattern-matching and regurgitating cargo cult fads of the day. When's the last time someone had an original thought? The only problem is AI can't shake your hand, yet.
While the argument is absurd, that doesn’t make it useless. At a cursory glance, anything is replaceable on the same basis that anything else is replaceable by AI. This argument may help correct some common and deep misconceptions.
its useless because its potentially confusing and misleading. the author did not put this together for any other reason then to get some clicks or push some agenda. i would try to dive into the poll data they used but id rather not give them my business email
Maybe it was written by the AI CEO of an AI CEO as a service company. Very effective.
One becomes a CEO like a politician by talking to the right crowd and convincing them.
Perhaps for some company in the future this will be replaced by AI salesmen talking to the right crowd and convincing them.
This is yet another of those articles that would never be written if an editor just said “take ten minutes and consider the implications.”
- Somebody owns the company. If you replace the CEO with “AI” then whoever controls the AI is now the CEO in the minds of the owner(s).
- A real CEO would resign if he were constantly undermined and ignored by the people whom he works for. In the case of AI, it’s safe to disrespect it.
- Imagine a CEO who is capable of micromanaging everyone and does it just as badly as a human, but 100 times more often.
- A CEO must be able to take responsibility for his actions. An AI cannot be responsible, under the law. No one can “work for” an AI. Labor law isn’t set up that way.
- It is not immoral to manipulate an AI. It’s called being tech savvy. For instance, I know from my research that I can get an LLM to change its mind quite often by asking “are you sure?”
- Since AI has all the biases of people, and will act on those biases foolishly and reliably, an AI CEO will spur a new boom of labor litigation.
- No decision in business is primarily “data-driven.” And even if we would like them to be, we never have the data we need.
- One of the key purposes of management is to deal with conflicts, disputes, disruptions. How could those be handled by an AI that has no ability to be responsible and will not be respected by anyone? I don’t want my beef with a dev adjudicated in a vending machine.
And middle managers too.
Just curious, any startups working towards this goal? Replacing leadership, decision making, people management, project management, negotiation and such with AI?
There are two established companies that I know of, Chinese Co. NetDragon Websoft (5k employees) has an AI CEO named Tang Yu and then there is a polish rum company called Dictador that did something similar. We'll see where it goes I guess.
[dupe]
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40512752
There has to be someone to make the final call and take responsibility. The AI and AI provider won’t do it.
Well when the company does a wrong doing, ai can’t be jailed !! Some one has to be the fall guy !!
This is so bleak, and the reason these bromides against CEOs appear is because this system of global capitalism is intent on commoditizing everything; even a CEO’s skill set.
Some people (either CEOs themselves or temporarily embarrassed wage workers) will bristle at this because it’s written from the perspective of warning/mocking CEOs who so readily automate-away workforces.
But an honest accounting would recognize that these automation processes have been happening for many decades, now. And maybe the CEO is diminished, but that’s besides the point that all of this just serves to accumulate wealth to the capital class, who’ve almost become sovereign (when Bezos, Musk, Andreeson et al can conduct independent foreign diplomacy or get a dedicated seat in the UNSC, I will be happy to revise this).
Everything is up for grabs, and if a board of ancient mummies can enslave a populace with an AI as well as with a flesh-and-blood C-suite, then they will. Because of the pressures to optimize and deliver more value that undergird our current society!
On the upside: an LLM probably lies less than a human CEO.
"Computers can't be held accountable" IBM ~1975
If they’re referring to general AI - which at this point is still sci-fi - then yes, a general intelligence can theoretically do any thinker or planners job. But given that we don’t have anything near general AI, this claim can’t be refuted and the article is pretty pointless.
If they’re speaking about LLM’s - well then this is just plain dumb.
You're telling me that an LLM, a current LLM, couldn't do a better job of running rabbit than its current CEO.
It would hallucinate less, that's for sure.
A current LLM certainly could do a much better job of running Twitter than its current CEO.
If I had been drinking coffee it would be in my lap now. Yes it WOULD hallucinate less.
Now we're talking. Replace upper management with autocomplete please to boost productivity, morale and overall sanity.
I mean, define ‘experts’.
(It seems to be one business studies professor.)
“experts”
that could be replaced with an AI...
I am the CEO / Sole Worker-Owner of my CAD Automation company.
I use the AI to solve problems in domains like customer communication, tax compliance and accounting, sales, pricing, marketing, product design, software engineering, and business process automation problems.
Without the AI, I know bits and pieces about all these domains but I struggle with execution, delegation, getting overwhelmed, and putting important things on the back burner.
With the AI, I'm a dreamer CEO that actually gets production work done!
Tax and accounting? Sounds dangerous, given LLMs have a penchant for making up citations (when having been asked to write research papers) with plausible sounding (but made up) information, titles, authors, etc. (or some combination of those - e.g. fake paper title but real author names).
How do you know it’s actually referenced things from real tax codes that are actually applicable to you, without extremely careful fact checking (which would take at least as much time as an expert would take to give real advice?)? Seems it could very easily do things like fabricate plausible sounding answers based on tax laws that are, for example, a mix of different laws from jurisdictions you aren’t in…
I came to the same conclusion that you did. Where it helped was letting me delegate.
With the help of the AI I was able to get my stuff together and bring it to a CPA.
Before that I was in kind of paralysis for a couple years, not filing taxes.