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To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth. As a developer I keep running into problems that r

by crnkofe 1mo ago

To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth. As a developer I keep running into problems that require some measure of creativity to solve or workaround. And regardless of how many years I've been in the industry I'm not running out of issues. They just keep getting more obscure. On the other hand leadership communication and problem resolution seem like the exact opposite of creativity and innovation. Its all about time proven, reliable solutions. Same layoff notices, recommendations, design everywhere. Repetitive, boring, politically correct and therefore easy to automate. Accountability will likely become reason n1 for keeping leadership roles intact that is until people become accustomed to AIs everywhere. After all what's the difference between a bot showing a layoff notice at 5am or an AI generated message/video from a human doing the very same thing.

fearmerchant 1mo ago
I'd argue that those CEO-type (leadership) positions are a lot about relationships which AI's aren't going to be able to replicate.
watercolorblind 1mo ago
The scifi story Manna starts with management being automated: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 It's a different type of soulless hell, and it's a good read if you haven't already.
- bayindirh 1mo ago
  Sorry, the site doesn't seem to resolve. Are you sure that the URL is correct?
  - bsenftner 1mo ago
    Must use the Internet Archive now: https://web.archive.org/web/20260725174355/https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://web.archive.org/web/20260725174355/https://marshallb... The author died.
    - watercolorblind 1mo ago
      Thank you for the backup link! I hadn't known he had passed, and I didn't expect the link to fail. I first read the story back in 2008 or so, and it's been one of those works that lodged itself in my mind so it's sad to hear he died.
      - Bluestein 1mo ago
        Goodness, what a find! Same here.-
      - bsenftner 1mo ago
        Worth knowing how he died and more about his life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Brain
  - nemomarx 1mo ago
    It's previously visited for me and still comes up on Google for the story, so I guess the site is just down unfortunately.
mr_tox 1mo ago
"I'm not running out of issues. They just keep getting more obscure." Totally agree, For me it's becouse AI takes in places I've never explored before.
petcat 1mo ago
> I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs I have the opposite opinion. I've never been a CEO, and have intentionally avoided any sort of manager/C-level opportunities at all the various companies I've worked specifically because they require a lot of effort at personnel management, investor relationships, customer relationships, and generally things requiring having to talk to people. That kind of thing just can't be replaced by a chat bot.
- malux85 1mo ago
  Exactly. Being a good CEO means reading the body language of your programmers so you can tell when they need support. It means communicating competence to investors and customers. It means making complex decisions with incomplete input, a lot of the time deep intuitions are required. It means having the good sense of judgement. Part of the time you are tyrant, part of the time you are parent, part of the time you are psychologist, mentor, master, healer, empath, judge and jury, and the most important part : is knowing that ALL of this is REQUIRED to be human actions and a little text input spitting out (even under ideal conditions - excellent) quality text to the above is definitely not going to work because every good CEO knows that its 50% the message you deliver, and 50% the delivery that matters. And also being a technical founder with 20 years coding experience, I dont think AI can replace programmers for a set of different but equally valid reasons.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - coliveira 1mo ago
    That's funny when you said that a CEO reads the body language of programmers. CEOs and high executives don't even bother looking at you!
    - garciasn 1mo ago
      I worked at a 10,000 person company ~15y ago. I was a lowly employee at the time; just a run of the mill Research Analyst writing code in SAS. I got on the elevator w/the CEO, said hello, and he knew exactly who I was and what I did. Two important grounding items for me when I went into management and my career accelerated: 1. Take the worst boss I ever had (coincidentally at the same company) and make sure that I do the exact opposite of everything they did when leading others. 2. Mirror the actions of that CEO and make sure I remember every single person and what they did; it leaves a lasting impression on people.
piltdownman 1mo ago
In terms of 'automating' Leadership, it's self-evident that Agentic AI is more than capable of inferring context and providing insight based on its significant business administration and management corpus. From this it can suggest actions, follow-up via a plethora of mediums and APIs, and generate up to the minute reporting on a variety of KPIs. In terms of replacing the function of a Leader, however, the reality is closer to that old joke about the Theoretical Physicist and the farmer - "I have a solution, but it only works for a spherical cow in a vacuum". The last thing I'd trust to navigate the Realpolitik of modern globalised business is a language model distilled by an Individual Contributor. When Agentic AI navigates moral hazard, it does so as a cosplayer at best - the final actualisation of Dramaturgical sociology. In fact, Erving Goffman's original Theatrical Metaphors from his 1959 opus 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life' map almost directly to the ludicrous symbiotic relationship defined by impression management on both sides of the prompt: AI systems aligning themselves by aping linguistic cues and saccharine affirmations, while users are effectively required to rephrase or reframe prompts to the point of absurdity in order to elicit the desired response, or otherwise navigate guardrails. Idealized organizations are not perfect. They are perfectly pathological. The top tier are effectively sociopaths operating under conditions of serious moral hazard. If Agentic AI becomes an able replacement, everyone dies. https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_Dies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_...
theshackleford 1mo ago
> To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs Of course you do. Which is why you won’t get anywhere. It’s always funny to watch though.
Gormo 1mo ago
> After all what's the difference between a bot showing a layoff notice at 5am or an AI generated message/video from a human doing the very same thing. Of course, any well-trained AI should be aware that the proper way to handle a layoff notice is to send it to your wall-mounted fax machine.
alexpotato 1mo ago
> To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth. Speaking as someone who has worked at multiple companies all the way from IC to team lead and even up to senior manager with a global team: Almost every job at every level has some version of "ok, what's the flowchart for this". People assume this is for tech jobs but they would be surprised that it's true for managerial roles as well. e.g. you have a poor performer then you run through this checklist: 1. is it an issue with the work being given? 2. is it an issue with another co-worker? 3. are they having a family issue? 4. it's a family issue, see if you can get details 5. oh, it's a sick parent? then implement the sick parent policy e.g. more flexible work hours, reduced work load, check in with them weekly till things improve etc Where the human part comes in is where you have some combination of the below: - event no one at the company has seen before - the above requires discussions amongst humans to figure out - those humans have to talk to other humans outside the company examples at two levels might be (both for hurricane Sandy): a. SREs have to deal with datacenters that don't have diesel b. HR has to deal with critical employees that have houses that were swept away I guess an AI could propose solutions to the above but it's a human that would actually make them happen (plus humans are more resilient to power outages).
- wuschel 1mo ago
  The way you have expressed it there are optimized workflows not only the managerial/executive, administrative, content producing set of workers, but in almost every profession, encoded in beaurocracy, checklist, best practices and culture: doctors, care workers, lawyers, policing ... The question is how well language models have internalized the optimal decision pathway and mitigating strategies to deviating circumstances. What data do they have to be trained on? If an AI defeats the best Go players in the world, surely it is a good question whether they can exceed in games with large unknowns such as business administration. As mentioned somewhere else in this thread, the moral and ethical layers is where some of the challenges of these system can be found.
  - wongarsu 1mo ago
    That ends up going in the DeepMind philopsophy of making AI, rather than the OpenAI philosophy. DeepMind makes AI that can defeat the best human Go players, OpenAI makes LLMs that are much more versatile but struggle with finishing a chess match without making illegal moves, never mind winning. The other question on my mind: Cases where we have known decision pathways is exactly what the expert systems of the 70s and 80s were about. And from my understanding there were some successes, but we mostly found that it doesn't scale. Both encoding optimal decisions and encoding the decision space of things that can happen are huge challenges. LLMs might be genuinely better here, because they can just make things up as they go along, but they are also difficult to control
freehorse 1mo ago
The problem I think is that each company usually has one CEO, so automation/higher productivity cannot lead to cutting CEO jobs by 50% or sth. Unless people with AI now can be CEOs in multiple companies at once, as they do not need to spend as much time in a single company now that they have AI? Or maybe with the help of AI they can take also different executive roles at the same time, as in now with AI why should one have a separate CEO and CTO when with AI one can do both jobs at once in the same amount of time one would do only one without AI?
- dylan604 1mo ago
  People do sit on multiple boards, so replace the board with multiple AIs?
  - freehorse 1mo ago
    You can have one human in a board supervising the AIs, or one human in multiple boards even, and cut the rest of the positions.
- parpfish 1mo ago
  Automating the c-suite doesn’t save you money by cutting headcount, it saves you money by reducing salaries. Having a decently competent AI executive would put a lot of downward pressure on the insane benefits packages these folks get
TwelveEyes 1mo ago
I strongly disagree with this take. AI does not have the theory of mind to manage complex social environments, and AI does not have the context and intuition and experience required to replace a CEO, any more than a random external worker could take over their job for a day.
- zer00eyz 1mo ago
  > context and intuition and experience required to replace a CEO Show me the CEO of a major tech firm who is accomplishing all this? https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/29/claude-opus-5-became-downright-ruthless-when-tasked-with-running-a-vending-machine/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/29/claude-opus-5-became-downr... Leadership, Management and being a Boss are not the same things. You need a solid mix of all three to be a successful executive. Cut throat, self aggrandizing, and a bit of a selfish asshole are all traits that lead to positive outcomes in these roles.
  - ZenoArrow 1mo ago
    > Cut throat, self aggrandizing, and a bit of a selfish asshole are all traits that lead to positive outcomes in these roles. Press X to doubt. In my experience, with those types of leaders, success happens despite them not because of them. Someone in a leadership role may have built a strong team around them that can counteract their own toxic behaviours, and they may try to take credit for the successes of their team, but they aren't bringing out the best in that team. Toxic workplaces often start with toxic leadership.
- naasking 1mo ago
  > I strongly disagree with this take. AI does not have the theory of mind to manage complex social environments Does Musk have a complex theory of mind to manage his employees, or does he just have a brutally efficient organizational strategy and gets rid of anything that doesn't fit? I think it's more the latter, and an LLM can absolutely do that.
pessimizer 1mo ago
> To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth. I disagree for entirely different reasons than others; I think you can't replace a CEO with AI for the same reason you can't replace a king with AI. It's a title, not a job. You can't even replace middle management with AI - not because it won't (eventually) be able to do the job "just as well," but that the job is largely to take the blame for failure, not to do things. These people like to take credit for being coordinators, just like property owners like to pretend that that's the same thing as a property manager, but they're different functions. One is a title, and one is a duty. If the person with the title takes up another duty, it's by choice. In the case of both property owners and business owners it's buying themselves a job, often (especially in the case of property owners) because they are in debt up to their eyeballs and can't afford another employee. CEOs are people who select from and approve choices that are handed to them by experts. You hire and fire them to reassure stockholders. Their only real job is to make complex, convincing excuses for their performance.
deltarholamda 1mo ago
The value-add for a meatbag CEO is the physical networking they do. They have to do executive functions as well, which could quite possibly be replaced with a well-trained LLM and even possibly exceed in overall quality. But an LLM can't go to conferences; they can't have Top Secret Meetings where a merger or acquisition is discussed; they can't run into Jim Executive of BigCorp Inc. in Vail and scheme up some big new thing; they can't fill a room full of institutional investors with confidence that the future is looking quite rosy. Now, one can certainly argue that all of that is bad, or not even necessary, but it is a thing they do. But I still think this is a good project, especially if it is demonstrated to excel at some significant fraction of what a meatbag CEO does. Because meatbag CEOs need to know that they are just as vulnerable to this sort of thing as their employees they so callously discard.
- PunchyHamster 1mo ago
  CEO, sure, but middle manager ?
- onaclov2000 1mo ago
  Being facetious of course, but didn't AI create their own reddit/chat rooms, what's stopping AI CEOs from "running into" other AI CEOs in other places?
  - jezzamon 1mo ago
    The lack of barrier to entry is the problem. That barrier is highly desirable in this context (for better or worse)
    - smaudet 1mo ago
      The lack of imagination here is the issue. I think AI bots are perfectly capable of replicating arbitrary barriers to entry, they can and will decide which (real or not) CEOs to interact with.
    - literalAardvark 1mo ago
      Not really. Yes, it's desirable for humans because we have very limited minds. Doesn't apply to AI.
mxkopy 1mo ago
The only real bottleneck for self-organized discord work groups becoming more mainstream is the need for a central point of contact for legal things, money things, and inter/intra communication things. I see 0 reason why there couldn’t be a system for distributing all of this work at some point. If you want to add a feature compliant with X Y Z, you need forms A B C and to implement I J K. Put it on the board for whoever’s interested and when it’s finished, add it to the set of things you’re compliant with. If there’s disagreement about how it should be implemented, elect a tiebreaker. Have automatic actions and alerts based on what you’re compliant with and what you intend to do. etc All this needs to work is the ability to reliably look stuff up by how you want to change the organization, and pattern match on previous approaches and your evolving situations. If you aren’t inventing anything new this is exactly what LLMs are for.
justincormack 1mo ago
You want to see innovation in layoff notices? There are some areas where innovation is not a good idea.
abeppu 1mo ago
I think also it's extremely hard to fairly judge high level decisions whose outcomes may not materialize for a very long time. This makes it genuinely hard for humans to get better (and one gets the impression that most of them don't) with more experience at the helm of a large and complex org. But it also means that it's hard to evaluate or train a machine on the task. You can maybe automate getting something plausible out, but how would you know if it was _good_ in a timely way? So how do you review a configuration or prompt change in this repo?
- psd1 1mo ago
  By using historic data. You should strictly segregate training and testing data, to be sure that your model has internalised decision-making principles. [0] It is definitionally true that any given moment in history is unprecedented, and that old thinking is invalidated by paradigm shifts. But not every single variable is randomised. The launch of the PC didn't embarrass every executive, for example. 0: https://www.owlposting.com/p/an-ml-drug-discovery-startup-trying https://www.owlposting.com/p/an-ml-drug-discovery-startup-tr...
- sigbottle 1mo ago
  > You can maybe automate getting something plausible out, but how would you know if it was _good_ in a timely way? Contrary to the other guy, the answer is accountability, either personal, or higher-level systems like competition and ultimately Darwinism.
cl-coder 1mo ago
Having worked at all sorts of roles, I would say that the owner is the only one not replaceable.
Shorel 1mo ago
Most leadership, let's say 95% of them, they are super easy to replace. An AI bot will do a better job, and with much lower compensation. Better return for your investment. Good leadership is very hard to replace. Think about Apple without Steve Jobs.
davidguetta 1mo ago
This is a terrible undesrtanding of leadership also at the end you as ceo have to sell to other humans. no human will buy from an ai
grackasthebig 1mo ago
https://fortune.com/2025/11/19/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-says-ai-can-do-his-job/ https://fortune.com/2025/11/19/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-says... Top CEO agrees

by crnkofe 1mo ago

fearmerchant 1mo ago

I'd argue that those CEO-type (leadership) positions are a lot about relationships which AI's aren't going to be able to replicate.

watercolorblind 1mo ago

The scifi story Manna starts with management being automated: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 It's a different type of soulless hell, and it's a good read if you haven't already.

bayindirh 1mo ago
Sorry, the site doesn't seem to resolve. Are you sure that the URL is correct?
- bsenftner 1mo ago
  Must use the Internet Archive now: https://web.archive.org/web/20260725174355/https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://web.archive.org/web/20260725174355/https://marshallb... The author died.
  - watercolorblind 1mo ago
    Thank you for the backup link! I hadn't known he had passed, and I didn't expect the link to fail. I first read the story back in 2008 or so, and it's been one of those works that lodged itself in my mind so it's sad to hear he died.
    - Bluestein 1mo ago
      Goodness, what a find! Same here.-
    - bsenftner 1mo ago
      Worth knowing how he died and more about his life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Brain
- nemomarx 1mo ago
  It's previously visited for me and still comes up on Google for the story, so I guess the site is just down unfortunately.

mr_tox 1mo ago

"I'm not running out of issues. They just keep getting more obscure." Totally agree, For me it's becouse AI takes in places I've never explored before.

petcat 1mo ago

> I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs I have the opposite opinion. I've never been a CEO, and have intentionally avoided any sort of manager/C-level opportunities at all the various companies I've worked specifically because they require a lot of effort at personnel management, investor relationships, customer relationships, and generally things requiring having to talk to people. That kind of thing just can't be replaced by a chat bot.

malux85 1mo ago
Exactly. Being a good CEO means reading the body language of your programmers so you can tell when they need support. It means communicating competence to investors and customers. It means making complex decisions with incomplete input, a lot of the time deep intuitions are required. It means having the good sense of judgement. Part of the time you are tyrant, part of the time you are parent, part of the time you are psychologist, mentor, master, healer, empath, judge and jury, and the most important part : is knowing that ALL of this is REQUIRED to be human actions and a little text input spitting out (even under ideal conditions - excellent) quality text to the above is definitely not going to work because every good CEO knows that its 50% the message you deliver, and 50% the delivery that matters. And also being a technical founder with 20 years coding experience, I dont think AI can replace programmers for a set of different but equally valid reasons.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- coliveira 1mo ago
  That's funny when you said that a CEO reads the body language of programmers. CEOs and high executives don't even bother looking at you!
  - garciasn 1mo ago
    I worked at a 10,000 person company ~15y ago. I was a lowly employee at the time; just a run of the mill Research Analyst writing code in SAS. I got on the elevator w/the CEO, said hello, and he knew exactly who I was and what I did. Two important grounding items for me when I went into management and my career accelerated: 1. Take the worst boss I ever had (coincidentally at the same company) and make sure that I do the exact opposite of everything they did when leading others. 2. Mirror the actions of that CEO and make sure I remember every single person and what they did; it leaves a lasting impression on people.

piltdownman 1mo ago

In terms of 'automating' Leadership, it's self-evident that Agentic AI is more than capable of inferring context and providing insight based on its significant business administration and management corpus. From this it can suggest actions, follow-up via a plethora of mediums and APIs, and generate up to the minute reporting on a variety of KPIs. In terms of replacing the function of a Leader, however, the reality is closer to that old joke about the Theoretical Physicist and the farmer - "I have a solution, but it only works for a spherical cow in a vacuum". The last thing I'd trust to navigate the Realpolitik of modern globalised business is a language model distilled by an Individual Contributor. When Agentic AI navigates moral hazard, it does so as a cosplayer at best - the final actualisation of Dramaturgical sociology. In fact, Erving Goffman's original Theatrical Metaphors from his 1959 opus 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life' map almost directly to the ludicrous symbiotic relationship defined by impression management on both sides of the prompt: AI systems aligning themselves by aping linguistic cues and saccharine affirmations, while users are effectively required to rephrase or reframe prompts to the point of absurdity in order to elicit the desired response, or otherwise navigate guardrails. Idealized organizations are not perfect. They are perfectly pathological. The top tier are effectively sociopaths operating under conditions of serious moral hazard. If Agentic AI becomes an able replacement, everyone dies. https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_Dies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_...

theshackleford 1mo ago

> To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs Of course you do. Which is why you won’t get anywhere. It’s always funny to watch though.

Gormo 1mo ago

> After all what's the difference between a bot showing a layoff notice at 5am or an AI generated message/video from a human doing the very same thing. Of course, any well-trained AI should be aware that the proper way to handle a layoff notice is to send it to your wall-mounted fax machine.

alexpotato 1mo ago

> To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth. Speaking as someone who has worked at multiple companies all the way from IC to team lead and even up to senior manager with a global team: Almost every job at every level has some version of "ok, what's the flowchart for this". People assume this is for tech jobs but they would be surprised that it's true for managerial roles as well. e.g. you have a poor performer then you run through this checklist: 1. is it an issue with the work being given? 2. is it an issue with another co-worker? 3. are they having a family issue? 4. it's a family issue, see if you can get details 5. oh, it's a sick parent? then implement the sick parent policy e.g. more flexible work hours, reduced work load, check in with them weekly till things improve etc Where the human part comes in is where you have some combination of the below: - event no one at the company has seen before - the above requires discussions amongst humans to figure out - those humans have to talk to other humans outside the company examples at two levels might be (both for hurricane Sandy): a. SREs have to deal with datacenters that don't have diesel b. HR has to deal with critical employees that have houses that were swept away I guess an AI could propose solutions to the above but it's a human that would actually make them happen (plus humans are more resilient to power outages).

wuschel 1mo ago
The way you have expressed it there are optimized workflows not only the managerial/executive, administrative, content producing set of workers, but in almost every profession, encoded in beaurocracy, checklist, best practices and culture: doctors, care workers, lawyers, policing ... The question is how well language models have internalized the optimal decision pathway and mitigating strategies to deviating circumstances. What data do they have to be trained on? If an AI defeats the best Go players in the world, surely it is a good question whether they can exceed in games with large unknowns such as business administration. As mentioned somewhere else in this thread, the moral and ethical layers is where some of the challenges of these system can be found.
- wongarsu 1mo ago
  That ends up going in the DeepMind philopsophy of making AI, rather than the OpenAI philosophy. DeepMind makes AI that can defeat the best human Go players, OpenAI makes LLMs that are much more versatile but struggle with finishing a chess match without making illegal moves, never mind winning. The other question on my mind: Cases where we have known decision pathways is exactly what the expert systems of the 70s and 80s were about. And from my understanding there were some successes, but we mostly found that it doesn't scale. Both encoding optimal decisions and encoding the decision space of things that can happen are huge challenges. LLMs might be genuinely better here, because they can just make things up as they go along, but they are also difficult to control

freehorse 1mo ago

The problem I think is that each company usually has one CEO, so automation/higher productivity cannot lead to cutting CEO jobs by 50% or sth. Unless people with AI now can be CEOs in multiple companies at once, as they do not need to spend as much time in a single company now that they have AI? Or maybe with the help of AI they can take also different executive roles at the same time, as in now with AI why should one have a separate CEO and CTO when with AI one can do both jobs at once in the same amount of time one would do only one without AI?

dylan604 1mo ago
People do sit on multiple boards, so replace the board with multiple AIs?
- freehorse 1mo ago
  You can have one human in a board supervising the AIs, or one human in multiple boards even, and cut the rest of the positions.
parpfish 1mo ago
Automating the c-suite doesn’t save you money by cutting headcount, it saves you money by reducing salaries. Having a decently competent AI executive would put a lot of downward pressure on the insane benefits packages these folks get

TwelveEyes 1mo ago

I strongly disagree with this take. AI does not have the theory of mind to manage complex social environments, and AI does not have the context and intuition and experience required to replace a CEO, any more than a random external worker could take over their job for a day.

zer00eyz 1mo ago
> context and intuition and experience required to replace a CEO Show me the CEO of a major tech firm who is accomplishing all this? https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/29/claude-opus-5-became-downright-ruthless-when-tasked-with-running-a-vending-machine/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/29/claude-opus-5-became-downr... Leadership, Management and being a Boss are not the same things. You need a solid mix of all three to be a successful executive. Cut throat, self aggrandizing, and a bit of a selfish asshole are all traits that lead to positive outcomes in these roles.
- ZenoArrow 1mo ago
  > Cut throat, self aggrandizing, and a bit of a selfish asshole are all traits that lead to positive outcomes in these roles. Press X to doubt. In my experience, with those types of leaders, success happens despite them not because of them. Someone in a leadership role may have built a strong team around them that can counteract their own toxic behaviours, and they may try to take credit for the successes of their team, but they aren't bringing out the best in that team. Toxic workplaces often start with toxic leadership.
naasking 1mo ago
> I strongly disagree with this take. AI does not have the theory of mind to manage complex social environments Does Musk have a complex theory of mind to manage his employees, or does he just have a brutally efficient organizational strategy and gets rid of anything that doesn't fit? I think it's more the latter, and an LLM can absolutely do that.

pessimizer 1mo ago

> To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth. I disagree for entirely different reasons than others; I think you can't replace a CEO with AI for the same reason you can't replace a king with AI. It's a title, not a job. You can't even replace middle management with AI - not because it won't (eventually) be able to do the job "just as well," but that the job is largely to take the blame for failure, not to do things. These people like to take credit for being coordinators, just like property owners like to pretend that that's the same thing as a property manager, but they're different functions. One is a title, and one is a duty. If the person with the title takes up another duty, it's by choice. In the case of both property owners and business owners it's buying themselves a job, often (especially in the case of property owners) because they are in debt up to their eyeballs and can't afford another employee. CEOs are people who select from and approve choices that are handed to them by experts. You hire and fire them to reassure stockholders. Their only real job is to make complex, convincing excuses for their performance.

deltarholamda 1mo ago

The value-add for a meatbag CEO is the physical networking they do. They have to do executive functions as well, which could quite possibly be replaced with a well-trained LLM and even possibly exceed in overall quality. But an LLM can't go to conferences; they can't have Top Secret Meetings where a merger or acquisition is discussed; they can't run into Jim Executive of BigCorp Inc. in Vail and scheme up some big new thing; they can't fill a room full of institutional investors with confidence that the future is looking quite rosy. Now, one can certainly argue that all of that is bad, or not even necessary, but it is a thing they do. But I still think this is a good project, especially if it is demonstrated to excel at some significant fraction of what a meatbag CEO does. Because meatbag CEOs need to know that they are just as vulnerable to this sort of thing as their employees they so callously discard.

PunchyHamster 1mo ago
CEO, sure, but middle manager ?
onaclov2000 1mo ago
Being facetious of course, but didn't AI create their own reddit/chat rooms, what's stopping AI CEOs from "running into" other AI CEOs in other places?
- jezzamon 1mo ago
  The lack of barrier to entry is the problem. That barrier is highly desirable in this context (for better or worse)
  - smaudet 1mo ago
    The lack of imagination here is the issue. I think AI bots are perfectly capable of replicating arbitrary barriers to entry, they can and will decide which (real or not) CEOs to interact with.
  - literalAardvark 1mo ago
    Not really. Yes, it's desirable for humans because we have very limited minds. Doesn't apply to AI.

mxkopy 1mo ago

The only real bottleneck for self-organized discord work groups becoming more mainstream is the need for a central point of contact for legal things, money things, and inter/intra communication things. I see 0 reason why there couldn’t be a system for distributing all of this work at some point. If you want to add a feature compliant with X Y Z, you need forms A B C and to implement I J K. Put it on the board for whoever’s interested and when it’s finished, add it to the set of things you’re compliant with. If there’s disagreement about how it should be implemented, elect a tiebreaker. Have automatic actions and alerts based on what you’re compliant with and what you intend to do. etc All this needs to work is the ability to reliably look stuff up by how you want to change the organization, and pattern match on previous approaches and your evolving situations. If you aren’t inventing anything new this is exactly what LLMs are for.

justincormack 1mo ago

You want to see innovation in layoff notices? There are some areas where innovation is not a good idea.

abeppu 1mo ago

I think also it's extremely hard to fairly judge high level decisions whose outcomes may not materialize for a very long time. This makes it genuinely hard for humans to get better (and one gets the impression that most of them don't) with more experience at the helm of a large and complex org. But it also means that it's hard to evaluate or train a machine on the task. You can maybe automate getting something plausible out, but how would you know if it was _good_ in a timely way? So how do you review a configuration or prompt change in this repo?

psd1 1mo ago
By using historic data. You should strictly segregate training and testing data, to be sure that your model has internalised decision-making principles. [0] It is definitionally true that any given moment in history is unprecedented, and that old thinking is invalidated by paradigm shifts. But not every single variable is randomised. The launch of the PC didn't embarrass every executive, for example. 0: https://www.owlposting.com/p/an-ml-drug-discovery-startup-trying https://www.owlposting.com/p/an-ml-drug-discovery-startup-tr...
sigbottle 1mo ago
> You can maybe automate getting something plausible out, but how would you know if it was _good_ in a timely way? Contrary to the other guy, the answer is accountability, either personal, or higher-level systems like competition and ultimately Darwinism.

cl-coder 1mo ago

Having worked at all sorts of roles, I would say that the owner is the only one not replaceable.

Shorel 1mo ago

Most leadership, let's say 95% of them, they are super easy to replace. An AI bot will do a better job, and with much lower compensation. Better return for your investment. Good leadership is very hard to replace. Think about Apple without Steve Jobs.

davidguetta 1mo ago

This is a terrible undesrtanding of leadership also at the end you as ceo have to sell to other humans. no human will buy from an ai

grackasthebig 1mo ago

https://fortune.com/2025/11/19/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-says-ai-can-do-his-job/ https://fortune.com/2025/11/19/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-says... Top CEO agrees