Let’s Replace All Corporate Chiefs With AI

In March, The Wall Street Journal’s Meghan Bobrowsky broke the news that Mark Zuckerberg was “building a CEO agent to help him do his job.” The purpose of AI Zuck was to help flesh-and-blood Zuck “get information faster—for instance, by retrieving answers for him that he would typically have to go through layers of people to get.”

To me, that sounded an awful lot like Zuckerberg was desperate to avoid talking to his employees. But earlier this week, The Financial Times’s Hannah Murphy set me straight. Sparing flesh-and-blood Zuck from talking to his employees, Murphy explained, is not the job of AI Zuck, but rather the job of an entirely different digital proxy, a “photorealistic, AI-powered 3D character” that we’ll call AI Zuck II. AI Zuck II’s avowed purpose, Murphy reports, is “to engage with his employees in his stead.”

Fobbing Meta employees off on AI Zuck II is necessary, per FT’s Murphy, because “Zuckerberg has become increasingly hands-on.” “Hands-on” used to mean doing what Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., in their best-selling 1982 business manual In Search of Excellence, called “management by walking around,” or MAWA. But that isn’t what Zuckerberg is doing. Instead, according to Murphy, he’s spending five to 10 hours per week coding AI products and attending product reviews. Applying a Peters-Waterman-style analysis, I would call this “management by sitting splendidly on your arse,” or MASSA. I envision a spiral-eyed Zuck twiddling dials ad infinitum to create a secret army of Zuck cyberslaves that resemble the clone troopers in Star Wars Episode II.

For chief executives, digital spirit animals are all the rage. I know this because on Monday my onetime Politico boss Jim VandeHei, subsequently co-founder and chief executive of Axios, posted an “Axios C-Suite” self-help column headlined “Building and exercising an AI-powered version of you.” VandeHei “loaded every speech, internal memo, column and TV appearance of [his] into both ChatGPT and Claude to create JimGPT.” Flesh-and-blood Jim “got JimGTP rocking in an hour or so.” Only an hour? Isn’t that kind of ... insulting? Let me assure you that, if it ever comes to market, TimGPT will have taken at least two decades to build, with white-coated technicians working in shifts round the clock.

Not that VandeHei lacks self-esteem. Unlike Zuckerberg, VandeHei created his AI familiar not to avoid talking to his employees (Jim loves to talk), but rather to supply another Jim VandeHei whose wisdom he can imbibe, like Narcissus contemplating his own reflection in a pool. Flesh-and-blood Jim advises, for example, the following prompt:

I have a hunch that [trend/shift] is taking place. Knowing I am the CEO of [company] in [industry], give me the five data points or signals I should look for to confirm or kill this theory, and suggest the cheapest way to test it this quarter. End by telling me an adjacent idea I am missing or underappreciating.

I don’t dispute this might be good question to pose to AI, (or, better yet, to another human being you hired to advise you). But why pose it to a digital version of yourself? Won’t JimGTP just tell VandeHei the sort of thing that would occur to him if he had a little more time? Where’s the added value in that? Another drawback is that JimGTP is programmed to write “in Axios style.” For my views on that subject, I direct you to my September 2022 post, “Hell Is A World In Which Everybody Writes Like Axios.”

When Mark Zuckerberg can use AI to avoid talking to the people on his payroll, and Jim VandeHei can use AI to talk into a digital mirror, the suspicion arises that chief executives are the most disposable actors in the AI-reengineered economy. I am not the first person to notice this. A September 2023 survey by the research firm edEx found that 49 percent of chief executives believed “most” or “all” of their jobs “should be completely automated or replaced by AI.” Anant Agarwal, the founder of edEx, told David Streitfeld of The New York Times that he thinks “80 percent of the work that a C.E.O. does can be replaced by A.I.”

Streitfeld further cited a 2017 survey in which 42 percent of 1000 British workers polled said they’d feel “comfortable” working for a computer rather than a person (which doesn’t speak well of British bosses). In September 2024, an article in Harvard Business Review stated flatly: “AI Can (Mostly) Outperform Human CEOs.” Sam Altman, godfather of ChatGPT and co-founder and chief executive of OpenAI, told Axios earlier this month: “Our job is maybe one of the more automatable jobs.”

Then why the hell do we pay you so goddamned much money?

The economic logic of AI is that humans are expensive to employ, and no human is more expensive to employ than the human who runs the company. In 2024, the last year for which data are available, chief executives were paid, on average, 281 times what the typical worker earns, according to the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute. Why do we pay them anything at all?

Altman shrewdly takes himself off the hook by accepting only a nominal salary ($65,000 two years ago) and no equity in OpenAI. (He’s not a saint, only a billionaire, worth $3.4 billion from other investments, including many linked in one way or another to OpenAI.) But Zuckerberg pulled down a reported $27 million in compensation in 2024. With $230 billion in the bank, Zuckerberg would seem to need that paycheck a hell of a lot less than Altman does. When the day arrives that two or more bots take over so much of Zuckerberg’s former duties, exactly what value will he provide the company?

Well, like the FT said, he’s coding. Can you code? I cannot. So that’s worth something. Zuckerberg is probably very good at it! But at this late date Meta must surely employ scores of people who do it much better. So it’s really not worth Zuckerberg’s (very expensive) time to do this work.

OK, maybe Zuckerberg needs more time to think Big Thoughts. Zuck built a gigantic company digitizing Harvard’s red-bindered Freshman Register, informally known as The Facebook; removing the The; then peddling its snob appeal to other colleges and eventually to all humanity. If you’d asked me the one time I met him (way back in 2005) whether this venture would yield a vast fortune I’d have told you no. So obviously Zuckerberg possessed a few insights I lacked.

But more recently Zuckerberg’s Biggest Thought was the Metaverse, a creepy virtual-reality realm in which we would all use avatars to shop, argue, bank, date, get scammed, etc. The Metaverse was a flop that cost the company a reported $80 billion over five years before flesh-and-blood Zuck finally threw in the towel last month. Even Meta employees reportedly disliked using the company’s VR headsets.

What exactly is it CEOs do, anyway? Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria spent more than a decade examining this question, reporting their findings in 2018. One surprising data point was that during the week, chief executives don’t work very many more hours than the rest of us: 48.5 hours, versus 44 hours for schmucks like you and me. They work through the weekend, though (79 percent of weekend days, averaging about 4 hours per day) and also on vacation (70 percent of vacation days, averaging about 2.4 hours per day). This suggests chief executives need to develop a digital doppelganger to interact with their wives and children (and yes, sometimes with their husbands, though only about 10 percent of Fortune 400 CEOs are women, and less than one percent are gay men).

Porter’s and Nohria’s least surprising data point was that chief executives spent 72 percent of their time in meetings. Sixty-one percent of their interactions were face-to-face and only 24 percent were electronic (typically email). Probably today, post-Covid, those numbers have flipped. In any event, the bulk of a chief executive’s job appears to be those very duties Zuckerberg is looking to offload.

My findings here are tentative, but I’ll venture to estimate at least half of all Fortune 500 executives today should be replaced by AI bots tomorrow, their stock options and salaries to be distributed among all those close-talking, lapel-grabbing employees Zuck is moving heaven and earth to avoid. These mass layoffs will prompt many howls of outrage among the top 0.1 percent. But as those same corporate leaders have told us so many times in the past: We’re running a business here, bub, not a charity.