Imagine for a second that you’re a CEO. Maybe you drive a sweet Tesla. Not one of those cyber truck monstrosities that people point and laugh at as they drive by, but one of the socially acceptable, cool Teslas. You drink a lot of kale smoothies. If things really go south, you once met a guy at a conference who could probably hook you up with a piece of land in Montana where you could ride out the apocalypse for a while.
Life is good.
But there’s also something nagging at you: those pesky board meetings. Investors clamoring for more growth, more profits. You need that one slide in your deck that makes every sit back in their chair and go, “Yeah, this is our guy.”
Enter: AI.
The perfect productivity icing you can smear over your board meeting deck and make everyone feel good about your bonus structure. This is great. You like what you do and gilets aren’t cheap.
Now, imagine that you are you. A considerable stretch, I know. But stick with me. As you’ve probably heard, AI is coming for my job, your job, and everyone’s jobs. Except rich peoples’ jobs. AI can’t do those. AI isn’t a genius. It can’t wear gilets. It’ll be able to do your job without complaining and without health insurance. It’ll do it with a cold precision and speed and you should quit now to save yourself the embarrassment.
If you’ve recently been tasked with “using AI” to make your job more efficient, it’s probably dawned on you that it’s not quite there yet. In fact, it’s not obvious it’ll ever get there. Chances are it’s probably adding to your workload, not subtracting from it. Sure, it’s fancy chatbot ways are enticing, but molding and prompting and cajoling AI into doing what you need it to do is an undertaking in itself. This cajoling doesn’t make it into CEO’s board meeting decks, though.
If you’re an individual contributor at an organization, you’ve likely felt this impending doom. Unfortunately, the entire US economy is currently hedged on AI working out. So it probably behooves us to figure out some use for it.
Instead of replacing you and me, here’s what we should do: replace the CEOs. This isn’t a new idea.
CEOs are expensive. They are also functionally an amalgamation of the wisdom of mediocre white men who went to business school, so what better way to improve upon that than using a tool whose primary aim attempts to take all recorded knowledge, sand off the edges, and put it in the driving seat? The recipe is simple: create an AI agent, load it up with a bunch of McKinsey case studies, ask it questions. If you want to get fancy, tell the agent to speak in vague positive sentiments and you’ve got yourself a great CEO. Plus, if you only replace the CEOs with AI, you still have a bunch of other employees around to check what it’s telling them to do before since they’re the ones who’ll actually have to do it.
Once you feel good that you’ve got a good AI CEO, then you can start working your way down the org chart. AI CMO, AI CTO, AI CPO. Sustainable growth forever. Board meeting decks still have that productivity sparkle and most people get to keep their jobs. Gilets for everyone.
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