[mrdependable]

I think the reason AI isn't going to replace CEOs, or anyone in the C suite, is pretty obvious. They see themselves as the company. Everyone else is a resource. AI is here to replace resources, just like investing in a brand new lawn mower. For them, replacing an executive with AI is like saying you're going to marry a broom.

[EGreg]

They're just a thin layer to be replaced last. They're just arrogant enough to think they're the company, but ultimately the endgame is -- all humans become economically insignificant compared to the automated economy.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/13/meta-ai-m...

[torben-friis]

Most companies contain several layers worth of business context that the higher ups have no idea of, as well.

Everything from "unpaid bills are handled this way" through "the website has a certificate that needs yearly renewal" to "we need to report our earnings biweekly in Indonesia, and we need to retry the form several times before it works".

This is not fundamentally doable by LLMs because the higher ups wouldn't know what to ask for, and if they did it would not be feasible to keep everything in single persons head, no matter how AI-assisted.

So that alone I think guarantees a good amount of unreplaced jobs.

[pixl97]

Eh, this sounds like the people that have been replaced at a lot of companies already.

>"the website has a certificate that needs yearly renewal"

For example, why modern certificates are being dropped down to very short times. The push to automate everything.

>"unpaid bills are handled this way"

Any company that has things like this will start changing their process.

You have this idea (and maybe the AI company CEOs do too) that this will be like a container drop in. No, instead these things will be part of a gradual process change and human parts will eventually disappear.

>So that alone I think guarantees a good amount of unreplaced jobs.

What percent. This is what matters at the end of the day. Once unemployment reaches high rates over all age groups in a society that is used to low unemployment things go bad. It can take longer to go bad where you have social safety nets and jobs programs, but in places like the US that is communism, so expect the haves to shoot at the have nots.

[tim333]

The CEOs can be appointed or fired by the owners of the business, regardless of how they see themselves. At the moment we don't have human level AGI so owners are better with humans doing the job but it could change down the line.

[Gagarin1917]

I think the more likely reason would be that legally someone needs to be in charge of the business.

[mrdependable]

That's true, too. I guess we will see if executive pay and credentials start going down. They could technically have AI make all the decisions while someone just plays the patsy.

[paulnpace]

In the U.S., most or all states require all corporations to have a president, secretary, and treasurer.

[pixl97]

Heh, how long before someones agent starts looking for these 3 so it can run the business in the background and feeding them all the reports they need to sign.

[icedchai]

In most jurisdictions, all three can be the same person.

[janalsncm]

> They see themselves as the company. Everyone else is a resource

Knowing nothing about how these things work, I wonder if the board will see it the same way? Even today I could see the following play out:

CEO says X. Board member puts a bunch of strategic info into ChatGPT on the spot which argues Y more convincingly than X.

In that moment, the CEO will find themselves arguing against a chatbot, which can gish gallop with plausible bs faster than you can say the word “transformative”.

Maybe they win the argument today, but eventually the CEO will be functionally replaced, and eventually actually replaced or watered down.