AI CEO – Replace your boss before they replace you

They're at the center of the hourglass that exists between external (board members, shareholders, customers, partners) and internal (employees) interests.

gscott• 8 months ago

One mention of 3d printed chicken spins up a new ai CEO, several ai damage control agents, Ai apology, new ai product ads, repeat as needed.

speed_spread• 8 months ago

Why waste GPU cycles when a simple bash script would do?

zkmon• 8 months ago

Funny. Infact, the blockchain smart contract (DAPPs) tried this before, by fully automating (they call it democratizing) the decisions. Not sure how it went.

keiferski• 8 months ago

This looks like the perfect counterpart to Boss as a Service:

https://bossasaservice.com/

chasing0entropy2• 8 months ago

Can you design an AI agent that I own, to replace me? This is what the market really wants and is probably one of the ONLY things that doesn't exist.

Just let me subscribe to an agent to do my work while I keep getting a paycheck.

crackalamoo• 8 months ago

Isn't this kind of the same as an AI copilot, just with higher autonomy?

I think the limiting factor is that the AI still isn't good enough to be fully autonomous, so it needs your input. That's why it's still in copilot form

-_-• 8 months ago

That's the premise behind Workshop Labs! https://workshoplabs.ai

IshKebab2• 8 months ago

Why would the market want that? Don't be stupid.

geoffmanning• 8 months ago

The world doesn't want assholes either but here we are

georgehotz7• 8 months ago

Who's giving you that paycheck? Why don't they just hire that AI agent themselves and cut out the middle man?

fijiaarone2• 8 months ago

Can you explain why we pay Sam Altman & Elon Musk? Or Jeff Bezos & Bill Gates? They’re just middlemen collecting money for other people’s labor.

Mtinie• 8 months ago

In this scenario the person who wants to be paid owns the output of the agent. So it’s closer to a contractor and subcontractor arrangement than employment.

zwnow3• 8 months ago

How are businesses going to get money if there are no humans that are able to pay for goods?

Lots of us are not cut out for blue collar work.

danenania2• 8 months ago

A question is which side agents will achieve human-level skill at first. It wouldn’t surprise me if doing the work itself end-to-end (to a market-ready standard) remains in the uncanny valley for quite some time, while “fuzzier” roles like management can be more readily replaced.

It’s like how we all once thought blue collar work would be first, but it turned out that knowledge work is much easier. Right now everyone imagines managers replacing their employees with AI, but we might have the order reversed.

OtherShrezzing2• 8 months ago

The AI agents don’t appear to know how & where to be economically productive. That still appears to be a uniquely human domain of expertise.

So the human is there to decide which job is economically productive to take on. The AI is there to execute the day-to-day tasks involved in the job.

It’s symbiotic. The human doesn’t labour unnecessarily. The AI has some avenue of productive output & revenue generating opportunity for OpenAI/Anthropic/whoever.

chasing0entropy2• 8 months ago

Because ultimately every job AI replaces will supplanted by two jonpbs - one to maintain the agent and another to maintain the infrastructure.

I believe once AI scales my theory will be proven universal.

My wife believes there will eventually also be a third job created to do the job.

cyanydeez2• 8 months ago

not unless you can afford your own super cluster. Otherwise, the AI you use will own you.

globular-toast2• 8 months ago

What would you actually do if you got that? I like watching movies and playing games, but that lifestyle quickly leads to depression. I like travelling too, but imagine if everyone could do it all the time. There's only so many good places.

Teever• 8 months ago

I would use the AI to build a robot that could build copies of itself and then once there are a sufficient number of robots I'd use them to build more good places to go to.

ErroneousBosh• 8 months ago

Just let me subscribe to an agent to do my work while I keep getting a paycheck.

I've already done this. It's just a Teams bot that responds to messages with:

"Yeah that looks okay, but it should probably be a database rather than an Excel spreadsheet. Have you run it past the dev team? If you need anything else just raise a ticket and get Helpdesk to tag me in it"

"I'm pretty sure you'll be fine with that, but check with {{ senior_manager }} first, and if you need further support just raise a ticket and Helpdesk will pass it over"

"Yes, quite so, and indeed if you refer to my previous email from about six months ago you'll see I mentioned that at the time"

"Okay, you should be good to go. Just remember, we have Change Management Process for a reason so the next time try to raise a CR so one of us can review it, before anyone touches anything"

and then

"If you've any further questions please stick them in an email and I'll look at it as a priority.

Mòran taing,

EB."

(notice that I don't say how high a priority?)

No AI needed. Just good old-fashioned scripting, and organic stupidity.

xtracto• 8 months ago

Reminded me of an episode of the IT Crowd where they put a recording of "Have you tried turning it off and on again? as the answering machine for an IT department.

firefoxd2• 8 months ago

I've replaced myself for the better part of a year now. You can too: https://getproxyai.com/

fblp• 8 months ago

lol this also appears to be satire?

saaaaaam2• 8 months ago

Take my money!

candiddevmike• 8 months ago

Really this is the only 10x part of GenAI that I see: increasing the number of reports exponentially by removing managers/directors, and using GenAI (search/summarization, e.g. "how is X progressing" etc) to understand what's going on underneath you. Get rid of the political game of telephone and get leaders closer to the ground floor (and the real problems/blockers).

dboreham2• 8 months ago

Also replaces lawyers.

IgorPartola• 8 months ago

From what I hear, this will not happen. AI keeps absolutely making up laws and cases that don’t exist no matter what you feed it. Basically anything legal written or partially written by AI is a liability. IANAL but have been reading a tiny bit about it.

jmye• 8 months ago

If your entire job, as a VP or director/manager, is getting progress reports, you’re probably a wildly shitty manager and ought to be replaced anyways.

Seems more like the kind of thing a “smartest guy in the building” dev believes to be true, than actual reality at a real company.

Having VPs “clear blockers” is absolutely asinine.

jvanderbot2• 8 months ago

My boss is a pretty awesome technologist, too, but has a lot of time sunk into business stuff.

I sent this along as a joke but I doubt any of us are enthused about working for an AI.

It would be cool to automate more of that business stuff but I suspect it's too "soft" to actually automate.

beng-nl• 8 months ago

This is an interesting observation - soft skills may turn out to be hard to automate.

jvanderbot2• 8 months ago

How is your AI going to go meet with investors and possible customers? Or present to the board? And AI can't be accountable not really. The whole idea is silly.

But as he joked, if it can do PowerPoint he'd let it take over that at least

didibus• 8 months ago

Joke aside, I do think think someone should work on a legitimate agent for financial and business decision, management, and so on.

Especially "decision making". I find it's one of the things that are tricky, making the AI agent optimize for actually good decisions and not just give you info or options, but create real opinion and take real decisions.

callamdelaney3• 8 months ago

Unfortunately LLM's aren't good at making decisions.

bofadeez• 8 months ago

I know they're supposed to be smarter than a year ago but you could have fooled me

I'm in a loop with Opus 4.5 telling it "be logically consistent" and then it says "you're absolutely right" and proceeded to be logically inconsistent again for the 20th time.

tbrownaw• 8 months ago

So instead of doing that, give it access to use something that's better at that?

thisisit3• 8 months ago

What kind of financial and business decisions? And what will be the metric for “good decision”?

yawnxyz• 8 months ago

Do we even ask these questions for existing analysts? If anything, we should be evaluating them neck to neck.

Animats• 8 months ago

Aw, it's just a joke. I thought someone was ready to really try it.

Eventually, there will be AI CEOs, once they start outperforming humans. Capitalism requires it.

satisfice3• 8 months ago

Capitalism requires that capital is owned and controlled by specific people. So, no, there cannot be an AI CEO. In other words, if you say you have an AI CEO, then that entity will be under the control of someone else, whom you might as well call the real CEO.

Just like how Twitter had a “CEO” who was some pliable female who did the bidding of the real CEO: Elon Musk.

groestl• 8 months ago

The way AI (and capitalism really) makes CEOs obsolete is by replacing all companies with just one. So only one CEO needed eventually.

zurfer• 8 months ago

There are shareholders/owners and CEOs. You can certainly have an AI CEO if the board of directors wants that. Although depending on the jurisdiction CEOs might need be humans, but surely not everywhere.

And you could even imagine AI owners with something like Bitcoin wallets. So far it wouldn't work because of prompt injections but the future could be wild.

Octoth0rpe• 8 months ago

Capitalism requires that capital is owned and controlled by specific people.

That is an overly simplistic description. One can imagine a board of directors voting on which AI-CEO-as-a-service vendor to use for the next year. The 'capital' of the company is owned by company, the company is owned by the shareholders. This is not incompatible with capitalism in principle, but wouldn't surprise me if it were incompatible with some forms of incorporation.

vanschelven• 8 months ago

in the same vein as http://developerexcuses.com/ (and presumably many others)

j45• 8 months ago

Great name.

tt243• 8 months ago

The UI looks good! Is there a reason this is being shared here? Feels like a collection of tired, trite oneliners that I’d expect to see on Twitter rather than here.

input_sh2• 8 months ago

Thank you brand new account, your contributions so far have clearly been more valuable!

tt243• 8 months ago

1. This account was created months ago. 2. This doesn’t seem like a very polite or valuable contribution either.

andy99• 8 months ago

Agreed, it’s only superficially funny, there’s a ton left on the table that could have made it actually good, it feels like it doesn’t adequately parody CEOs or AI in a way that indicates any insight.

coffeecoders2• 8 months ago

How hard would it be to run a simulator with multiple LLMs. Say, one as the boss and a few as employees. Just let them talk, coordinate, and "work"? Could be the fastest way to test what actually happens when you try to automate management.

fragmede2• 8 months ago

Not exceedingly so: https://news.ysimulator.run/faq

IshKebab2• 8 months ago

I dunno the comments here perfectly capture HN-ackshewelly!

https://news.ysimulator.run/item/4317

ai-christianson4• 8 months ago

This is quite literally what we've built @ Gobii, but it's prod ready and scalable.

The idea is you spin up a team of agents, they're always on, they can talk to one another, and you and your team can interact with them via email, sms, slack, discord, etc.

Disclaimer: founder

krater23• 8 months ago

And they simulate a externalized team where the enterprize that pays the team doesn't knows that it's just AI and just thinks that these chinese/indian/african people of this external team are really bad at what they are doing.

jayd16• 8 months ago

Can I get this in an ant-farm mode where I can see them doddle around a cube-farm office?

coffeecoders2• 8 months ago

Interesting approach, but I mean more in the sense of a multi-agent sandbox than workflow automation. Your project feels like wrapping a bunch of LLMs into "agents" with fixed cadences, it is a neat product idea, even if it mostly ends up orchestrating API calls and cron jobs.

The thing I’m curious about is the emergent behavior, letting multiple LLMs interact freely in a simulated organization to see how coordination, bottlenecks, and miscommunication naturally arise.

Cool project regardless!

BoorishBears2• 8 months ago

Can your team of agents figure out why the extremely basic homepage does a stutter step on a $7000 Macbook Pro: or are they taking off Thanksgiving?

https://imgur.com/a/WZG9VLm

PhilippGille• 8 months ago

Multiple projects for autonomous multi agent teams already exist.

fijiaarone2• 8 months ago

Left to their own devices, the LLMs would probably design a pocket watch.

simultsop• 8 months ago

Shut up and take my money.

jondwillis• 8 months ago

I love that they’re all called David except for Simon

coliveira5• 8 months ago

This is a common thing among their mafia.

aussieguy1234• 8 months ago

You can make this yourself quite easily.

Choose a UI that lets you modify the system prompt, like open WebUI.

Ask Claude to generate a system card for a CEO.

Copy and paste the output into a system prompt.

There you have it, your own AI CEO.

sunnybeetroot• 8 months ago

Now do Dropbox next

danenania2• 8 months ago

Though I think the CEO role is realistically one of the hardest to automate, I’d say middle management is a very juicy target.

To the extent a manager is just organizing and coordinating rather than setting strategic direction, I think that role is well within current capabilities. It’s much easier to automate this than the work itself, assuming you have a high bar for quality.

damion6• 8 months ago

Looks like that's a response to Linus and Linux community saying that Qualcomm chips I weren't able to run Linux what hey it's good though at least now there's internal support

thisisit3• 8 months ago

I like the fun part of it. But this is clearly vibe coded slop. The awful pink colour scheme, clickable buttons which don’t do anything bang in middle of the page, the share button which doesn’t really share etc.

And some of the messages keep repeating like carbon footprint etc. Just seems low effort and not in a fun way.

willis936• 8 months ago

Counterpoints: this joke isn't worth the effort to make it high quality and the jank is part of the joke. AI slop is garbage, presenting it as otherwise would be missing the point.

shmerl• 8 months ago

Is that you, Delamain?

hbarka• 8 months ago

Our CEO did not write a customary Thanksgiving email. There was nothing from other C-level leadership. I’ve been around long enough to see this erosion in company culture custom. What is happening? Perhaps an AI CEO would have these subtleties.

briandw• 8 months ago

Ok so clearly a satire. However I kinda want this. They make some really good points about how an AI would be better than many CEOs. Honestly some of the companies I've worked for would be better with Gemini at in charge. Yes humanity is doomed, but at least I would understand the motivations and we'd have less CEO ADHD moments. (CEO ADHD -> "Some other CEO told me about X, why aren't we doing X")

caminanteblanco• 8 months ago

I feel like if I mention technology X in my system context for Gemini, there is a 100% chance that when I ask for hiking recommendations Gemini will say "As a user of technology X, you would appreciate the beauty and elegance of the Cuyamaca National Forest"

devinprater• 8 months ago

I hate it when it does that.

arbuge• 8 months ago

I'd be concerned about all the CEO's reports prompt injecting the boss though.

Give me a raise so I can buy her medicine, or my grandma dies...

darth_avocado• 8 months ago

If the AI is good enough to replace a CEO, dead grandma is part of the training data

sagarm2• 8 months ago

This already happens! We just call it schmoozing.

whattheheckheck• 8 months ago

Make all of the communications to the ceo Ai open to everyone to see how it responds

Simulacra• 8 months ago

It's cute, and fun, but I disagree. It could make a mistake, but it could go a long time with giving us confidence and a reasonable return of intelligent results. I think that can lull us into dependency. Do we really want to give up decision-making to AI? I don't think so.

With that said, if it's used purely as a tool by a CEO, and overtime has been developed with the optimal parameters for the company with its culture and everything (thank Apple) then the AI can help make decision decisions for the company.

bluefirebrand• 8 months ago

Do we really want to give up decision-making to AI? I don't think so.

It seems to me that a great deal of people cannot wait to give up decision-making to AI

gizajob3• 8 months ago

“This is the most revolutionary email about the reallocation of corporate parking spaces in the history of iPhone.”

fragmede2• 8 months ago

Do we really want to give up decision-making to AI?

If you have a problem with it, I've got some bad news for you.

HFT firms have been doing this long before ChatGPT hit the scene, and making millions off of it.

Saigonautica• 8 months ago

I hear you.

I worked as a consultant for a company where the CEO one day, they just started using AI chat for everything. Every question you asked, they just forwarded it. Same thing for company strategy, major decisions, presentation content, and so on.

Initially, I was really annoyed. After I took a deep breath, and read through the wall of text they sent (to figure out how to respond), I eventually realized it was slightly better than their previous work. Not like, night-and-day better, but slightly better.

Since then, I've been playing with the idea of 'hiring' an AI to manage my freelance and personal work. I would not be required to do what it says, but I could take it under consideration and see if I work better that way. Sort of like the ultimate expression of "servant leadership".

rigrassm2• 8 months ago

Since then, I've been playing with the idea of 'hiring' an AI to manage my freelance and personal work.

Shit, I think you are now personally responsible for 3-4 home projects I've neglected investing time into actually getting some attention. I too am much more productive and oddly enough, find the work more interesting when It's someone else asking and waiting for me to deliver it.

I haven't tried the Gemini CLI yet and creating an agent that acts like a customer I have to answer too about projects progress sounds like a perfect project idea for this weekend.

Question is, will I actually see this one through our will it too wind up in homelab project purgatory!

tcgv• 8 months ago

Only Male AI-CEO avatars?

Gender bias checked!

canyp3• 8 months ago

I was going to mention the same thing, also the page is clearly designed by a woman. Never mind that neither Sundar nor Satya are not white, or that many VPs in the Big Tech world are women. OP seems to have a very distorted view of the corporate world and has villified the white alpha male in her mind.

artursapek• 8 months ago

man, why does slop like this get to the front page yet my project I've been slaving away on dies in "New"

cheema332• 8 months ago

The answer is easy, if you choose to accept it.

Your project, whatever it may be, is worse than this AI slop.

If you think it is not, please share it here. Let us judge it. A little honest feedback might be what you really need.

Barathkanna• 8 months ago

The site is obviously satire, but the interesting part is the growth tactic behind it. oilwell.app is using a meme page as a distribution engine instead of a standard marketing site.

In a crowded AI tooling market, this kind of contrast joke on the front paired with a real product behind it, cuts through noise in a way a normal landing page wouldn’t. People mock the gimmick, but the gimmick is doing exactly what it’s designed to do, get everyone talking.

seydor2• 8 months ago

It's easier to replace the ceo and management than the leaf nodes of production. The opportunity for CEO as a service is enormous

thih9• 8 months ago

Easier in what way? I’d say this wouldn’t fare better than other recent AI implementations.

I.e. I’d guess doing this in practice with current state of the AI and without expert supervision would lead to some catastrophic error relatively soon.

seydor2• 8 months ago

managerial roles are information-based , while we are far from automating a multi-faceted physical-world-facing role such as a plumber or a cook

sagarm2• 8 months ago

The job of the C-suite is generating plausible human text, which LLMs are very good at.

patrick4urcloud• 8 months ago

nice !

frag• 8 months ago

Ah fun enough I wrote a post just about that https://open.substack.com/pub/defragzone/p/ceo-is-obsolete?r...

mannanj• 8 months ago

lol fun satire and totally true true for the bigger companies the incentive for the board is to replace the excess too.

beezle• 8 months ago

The free version of Gemini says it could not replace the CEO of JP Morgan Chase but that it would make an excellent Chief Risk Officer or Chief Strategist. That would still save a ton of money!

omneity• 8 months ago

Perhaps not a CEO but I figure an AI COO could be quite valuable for founder-types like me.

tamimio• 8 months ago

Oh no, not the protected class!!

AI can and should replace CEOs, Lawyers, and even non surgeon doctors. The fact that AI is always brought up when it comes to software development layoffs (ironically they are the ones who built it) but yet it isn’t impacting the ones that it easily could, raise so many questions, and clearly shows that AI is being weaponized to lower wages of some workers while others are protected by regulations and lobbyists.

kderbyma• 8 months ago

My Last Job could definitely benefit from this…. /s (not)

leogout• 8 months ago

No woman CEO ?

josefritzishere• 8 months ago

This is a little too on the nose.

AI CEO – Replace your boss before they replace you

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