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I have no idea why so many companies are focusing on replacing entry level work with AI; the real alpha is at the top of the org chart.
I have an idea. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas.
1) Investor relations: Yes an AI could answer questions about the financials on the quarterly earnings call. With a lot of careful handling you might maybe even get it to do this in a way that it wouldn’t hallucinate and lead to shareholder lawsuits and SEC enforcement action. But would it go out for lunch with a bunch of fund managers and convince them to keep their investment when you’ve had a bad quarter? No. Would it take a 3-hour meeting with investment bankers to talk through how to recapitalize or refinance debt? No. If you’re talking a startup CEO is it going to convince a16z, SVF, etc to invest? Nope. If you think it will you’ve never done any of those things. It’s trying to capture lightning in a bottle- not a process you can automate. For example, how did Adam Neumann convince Steve Cohen to invest in WeWork? (I have this on the authority of a friend who was one of about 10 people there) He showed up late, and drunk for a small dinner at Steve Cohen’s apartment and got everyone there doing tequila shots. This is not something an AI is capable of.
2) Corporate strategy. Yes you can get it to generate meaningless gibberish on powerpoint, so you might think corporate strategy would be covered, but consider just a few of the big calls Satya Nadella has made (off the top of my head) in the last couple of years. 1) betting big on OpenAI 2) Intervening to save Sam Altman’s ass after he was fired 3) basically giving up on the “console wars”, ceding the hardware victory to Sony, shutting down a bunch of game studios telling the world how tough the climate is even though you’ve just had the most profitable years in your history, betting big on gamePass etc? Gonna do that? No it won’t.
3) Managing the top executive team. Is it going to do this? Of course not.
Not saying an AI couldn’t possibly do a much better job than current CEOs in some hypothetical world where CEOs do different things from what they do now, but in our world, there is literally none of the black magic bs that CEOs pull to get corporations to be worth obscene bucks that an AI could do.
I’ve only seen this referred to as a strategic failure. You seem to be declaring otherwise. What’s the upside for Microsoft?
2) Trained on MBA knowledge, it would know which tools to call and when.
3) This is the only valid point and a weak one at best considering AI girlfriends and people developing AI psychosis due to close relationships with their AI. This part is coming.
Bro I have to continuously prompt and plan even to get a reasonably sane piece of code written w/ Claude. I’m not surprised this failed. Its like they wanted it to.
There's plenty of blind spots in a real world situation. It was trained to answer questions and score well in exams, not to negotiate and evaluate the value of a tungsten cube, and so on. There weren't enough scams in the training set. And seeing how rare data is from a CEO's perspective, I expect it would perform much worse.
It's not just vending machines, it does poorly in games with full wikis too.
So yes, in theory.
My first thought was"but an AI is not responsible", but how responsible is a CEO? They seem to get away with a lot. I could be wrong though
Maybe at small startups they are more involved, but the larger the company, the less I think that CEOs or other C-Suite types actually do.
While I also think ChatGPT is over-hyped and largeley incorrect in what it says, I would answer your question with a "yes". ChatGPT is perfectly capable of writing/delivering speeches at MS Build or whatever.
Everything else is delegated to lower level executives and staff.
The CEO also needs to sell those decisions to the organization to get buy-in on the vision and carry it out. How inspired will the organization be by the direction of an AI? No one in an organization will care about this stuff more than the CEO (if they are decent). An AI can’t care, so why would anyone else?
I say knowingly because actually the sum total of accumulated info for just a month or two of human activity eclipses even today's LLM.
And the CEO decisions are frequently flawed because there's a strong filter of the information from below.
Perhaps a crowd sourced (employee sourced) decision making process would be best with the wisdom of crowds.
Rather, you just don't understand what CEOs in large public companies actually do. You're comparing them to earlier stage CEOs, who can be more hands on.
When running a public company of a quarter million people, the CEO's responsibility starts to look more like an asset manager responsible for a $4 trillion dollar book.
And no - nobody wants that role replaced by an LLM.
In the long run nobody out performs consistently anyway. We all get hit due to market events.
You may be giving CEOs much more credit than is due. And for all that they actually do, the outperformer is a rarity not the norm.
LLM could certainly fit this. Particularly when trained with all the MBA nonsense education in the world. It wouldn’t be the end of the world and it wouldn’t be substantially better/worse. But it would be cheaper.
What, specifically do you think they do?
Since it's not possible to blame AI, no ChatGPT can't be used to replace the CEO of Microsoft.
imo its possible, but not in the current decade.
the low end of employees are the ones easily replaceable, and the higher you go in hierarchy the more it is about relationships.
infamouscow•1d ago