Let’s Replace All Corporate Chiefs With AI |
Let’s Replace All Corporate Chiefs With AI
Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Jim VandeHei are halfway there already. Let’s follow that train of thought.
In March, The Wall Street Journal’s Meghan Bobrowsky broke the news that Mark Zuckerberg was “building a CEO agent to help him do his job.” The purpose of AI Zuck was to help flesh-and-blood Zuck “get information faster—for instance, by retrieving answers for him that he would typically have to go through layers of people to get.”
To me, that sounded an awful lot like Zuckerberg was desperate to avoid talking to his employees. But earlier this week, The Financial Times’s Hannah Murphy set me straight. Sparing flesh-and-blood Zuck from talking to his employees, Murphy explained, is not the job of AI Zuck, but rather the job of an entirely different digital proxy, a “photorealistic, AI-powered 3D character” that we’ll call AI Zuck II. AI Zuck II’s avowed purpose, Murphy reports, is “to engage with his employees in his stead.”
Fobbing Meta employees off on AI Zuck II is necessary, per FT’s Murphy, because “Zuckerberg has become increasingly hands-on.” “Hands-on” used to mean doing what Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., in their best-selling 1982 business manual In Search of Excellence, called “management by walking around,” or MAWA. But that isn’t what Zuckerberg is doing. Instead, according to Murphy, he’s spending five to 10 hours per week coding AI products and attending product reviews. Applying a Peters-Waterman-style analysis, I would call this “management by sitting splendidly on your arse,” or MASSA. I envision a spiral-eyed Zuck twiddling dials ad infinitum to create a secret army of Zuck cyberslaves that resemble the clone troopers in Star Wars Episode II.
For chief executives, digital spirit animals are all the rage. I know this because on Monday my onetime Politico boss Jim VandeHei, subsequently co-founder and chief executive of Axios, posted an “Axios C-Suite” self-help column headlined “Building and exercising an AI-powered version of you.” VandeHei “loaded every speech, internal memo, column and TV appearance of [his] into both ChatGPT and Claude to create JimGPT.” Flesh-and-blood Jim “got JimGTP rocking in an hour or so.” Only an hour? Isn’t that kind of ...........