A chief financial officer focuses on cash flow, makes sure the taxes are paid, and ensures the financial statements of the company are properly prepared. It isn't as if executives can't be useful for a company. It would probably spit out something much better than 'balancing sufficient yield in the present with necessary investment in the future.' Alternatively, imagine asking any old AI model to describe the job of a CEO. He also incorrectly stated that 'the CEO can see opportunities that others don't see' and 'make the judgments and tough calls others are unable to make' thanks to being 'the one person whose boss isn't another company employee.' Can you imagine any Procter & Gamble employee bringing such a vapid and generic answer to their manager? Can you imagine telling your boss that what you did today was 'interpreting the meaningful outside'? Lafley appears to summarize his position and value to the company as someone who doesn't actually do or have any responsibility for anything while also holding more power than anyone else in the organization. 'The CEO alone experiences the meaningful outside at an enterprise level and is responsible for understanding it, interpreting it, advocating for it, and presenting it so that the company can respond in a way that enables sustainable sales, profit, and total shareholder return (TSR) growth.' Lafley wrote a 2009 Harvard Business Review article called ' What Only the CEO Can Do.' Once described as the 'most successful CEO in P&G History,' Lafley made as much as $19.5 million a year in his role. Most of the time is spent in meetings, talking about 'strategy,' and making big calls rather than contributing meaningfully to the organization, through either experience or actual execution.Įven when major CEOs are given the chance to clearly state the value they offer to a company, it comes across as noxious word salad. The final report put the executives' various tasks into impressive-sounding buckets like 'people and relationships,' 'functional and business unit reviews,' and 'strategy.' But digging deeper, it's clear that these painfully vague allocations of time are masking the fact that executives have a great deal of trouble telling you what they do for a living. 'You can't replace me,' the attitude screams, 'I'm just too valuable.' So what exactly is it that these executives are doing on a daily basis that creates so much value? A 2018 Harvard study of 27 CEOs tried to answer this question. Actually, AI is too advanced for that job, all you need is a Fisher Price tape recorder loaded up with a bad bunch of ideas.' If it's broke, then fix itĬEOs like to project an image of invincibility - without them the directionless company will fall apart. An AI model would likely give quicker answers, be in a continual state of self-improvement, take feedback instantly, and deliver the same kind of 'operational efficiency' for which the current crop of CEOs are paid millions of dollars a year.Īs the comedian Scott Seiss succinctly put it in a late-July TikTok post: 'Let's replace our employees with AI? Let's replace our CEOs with AI. Failing that, I would argue that the opaque role of the CEO should be the first one to be replaced by artificial intelligence. A chief executive must meaningfully contribute in a way that is measurable and delivers clear value for the company. The solution is fairly simple: We must hold CEOs accountable in the same way that we do their employees or dissolve the role entirely. Far from being an actual contributor to a company's bottom line, the late 20th century's 'superstar CEO' movement has ushered in a generation of executives who operate mainly as figureheads with little actual responsibility or accountability. Look a little closer, though, and it becomes clear that the role of the modern CEO is not only broken, as I've pointed out before, but it could easily be done by the technology we have now.Īmerica's top CEOs make over 300 times more than the average worker, despite the fact that their primary duty is to make easily replicable optimization decisions based not on a real understanding of the business but on inputs from spreadsheets fed to them by consultants. The only job that seems to be safe from the rise of ChatGPT and other AI tech is, oddly enough, the most expensive and easily automated role: CEO.Ĭhief executives have recently spent a lot of time threatening to replace their lazy, entitled, and unproductive workers with AI, but they never seem to face the same level of scrutiny other employees do. It often indicates a user profile.įrom writers and teachers to bankers and lawyers, most jobs seem ripe to be replaced by artificial intelligence - with one notable exception. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.

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