I mentioned this to someone the other day, and they rebuffed that part of what you get with a CEO is their network and their ability to network. AI won't replace that, at least not anytime soon.
I think this is true. There was an article on HN the other day about how Moderna has already re-organized its leadership structure around AI.
It makes sense to me that AI could conceivably already be as good at making the hard, data-based decisions that CEOs make, and that, therefore, they could one day be replaced by AI. Meanwhile, you've got the soft skills part of being an executive, which humans are better at (as long as the people they deal with are also humans). So, you could split that CEO role into two parts, each specializing in half of what a CEO today does. Both roles would probably do a better job than the median CEO today, and get paid less overall.
But that "not anytime soon" part is the only thing I disagree with. Because I just don't know how long the timeline is for stuff like that. It can change pretty fast.
Will they really get paid less? The feeling I have now is that people are paid a lot not because of what they do, but because of the potential damage they can do in case they fucked up. E.g. CEOs, lawyers, etc. Moving some of the work to AI doesn't reduce the risk, so they should have the same pay in my mental model.
Plus C-level executives typically don't lower their pay, and IMO investors apparently don't care that much about their pay, I can't see a reason why their pay will be reduced (significantly).
CEO's typically make decisions when there isn't enough data to support the obvious direction. In this way, they are anti-pattern finders that rely on gut or some anecdotal experience. They are most often wrong, but when they are right and it's a success they are considered genius. I'm not sure an AI can make a non-obvious decision based on feeling.
Did you find any way to generate good ideas with AI? Anecdotally, I found it incredibly unsatisfactory in this sense. It normally re-hashes old ideas without any internal coherence, like those novelty websites combining two existing startups to create a random mission (e.g. “AirBnB for motorbikes”).
When you consider that LLMs are trained on what can be scrapped from the web, the so called "creativity" comes from mashing together less commonly co-associated ideas.
I think CEO networking is code for cartels & collusion.
I think it is the layers of muddle management that could easily be replaced by AI.