I don't know why this needs to be a joke. Assuming the rest of the company is minimally competent and the middle managers can write clear executive documents an LLM will probably beat the average CEO just by virtue of not having moods. The only downside is that LLMs can't do in person "social networking" yet.
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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All true. To your question, however: until software can be named as a legal fiduciary, CEOs can only be functionally replaced. That is, a real person who can be summoned by a court has to take responsibility for whatever shit the LLM gets the company into.
E: way more replies than I’m used to, most re: same issue, so I’m clarifying here.
Preface: totally not my area, IANAL.
To clarify, I specifically meant CEOs can be named in a lawsuit by the shareholders for failure in fiduciary capacity. I didn’t mean a summons to answer for the sins of the corporation. TLDR: math models can’t be sued.
(But if I’m wrong I’m wrong.)
The middle managers can take turns as the Straw CEO for legal purposes. Or maybe someone can provide Straw CEO as a Service while living somewhere with few extradition treaties.
"We have no king. We're an autonomous collective"
Rotate it as an "on call" role monthly among all employees. If called upon to act, the person receives CEO-level salary for the necessary hours. And they're in the running for an end-of-year bonus, to be voted on by all employees depending on the results of their actions in that role. (Splitting it between equally-valuable Acting CEOs is permissable.)
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I believe the corporation itself is treated as a distinct legal entity for litigation purposes and shields officers of the company unless there are specific circumstances around any individual. I don’t think there is a legal requirement for a corporation to have a CEO. I think this just further confirms the idea of the CEO “role” being fully automated to be more than viable and a genuine costs savings. Much lower risk than relying on AI to replace skilled technical functions.
Someone with more corporate legal knowledge could provide further insight.
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That would be the Board of directors for the company since they select the CEO or virtual equivalent. But current laws don't support bringing anything against a CEO for a company's wrongdoing. Even less for the board of directors.
Well, not quite. The corporation is a distinct legal entity, and is served a summons per se. For practical purposes of actually delivering the papers to a person, the corporation must have a designated representative. This may be anybody, and there are businesses that specialize in serving as the designated representative for perhaps hundreds of corporations. (Especially those that exist only as legal entities.) I know of one nearby me that's basically just a mailbox, even though it's listed as the address for many, many corporations.
The whole purpose of a corporate entity, as a legal concept, is to shield the directors, and officers, from personal liability. Unless personally named in a suit, a CEO almost never shows up in court. That's a job for an attorney.
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middle managers can write clear executive documents
AI for that too. Middle management is just as bad.
I've seen from personal experience that the only thing worse than bad middle management is no middle management.
Getting called all the way up to the VPs office to try and explain some systems architecture to a guy who only knows how to say "But why doesn't it work?!" at you over and over again is... not fun.
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I've read that one of the jobs most suited to takeover by AI are CEOs.
LLMs are bullshit machines. I dont see how there's any question.
Yes, but can they "synergise, the verticals, while hyperspeeding through deepdiving outside of the box thinking?" I think NOT
Sounds like you're using a 2025 harness on your CEO bot bro
You are really a thought leader, I'll need to ping some ideas off of you to help move the needle. But we will have to circle back. We can take this offline.
All of these ideas are literally the best things I ever heard.
I would say that doing so would mean that there's no one to hold accountable, but then I remembered the hellscape I live in where ceos don't face accountability anyways, so yeah...
No one knows why some CEOs succeed so much, and others fail so hard. Rather than admit that they are guessing, executive suites and boards of directors both engage in mystical thinking, and then shed as much blame/yank as much credit as they can get away with. CEOs are where they are because of a social club, and not because they have any specific demonstrable skills, high intelligence, overwhelming empathy, insight into the future of business, unmatched creativity, etc.
Hallucinating that CEOs know what they should be doing, and the "more hours worked means more things got done" thinking are the largest and most damaging mental viruses of the corporate world.
That's true when you consider their official tasks... However after years in industries, it became apparent to me that their maon job is to "have contacts in high places".
When your CEO signs a deal with their friend's friend for the biggest contract of the year, it's hard to replace that by an AI...
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It's parody right now, but as you read the article, it begins to make perfect sense that AI is far better suited to replace the responsibilities of a CEO, than the varied responsibilities of the workers, especially when the economics are taken into account. You can save millions by getting rid of workers, but there's a lot of work involved in replacing all those jobs. Or you can save millions by getting rid of a single CEo, and you only have to replace one job.
At some point, somebody is going to offer this service for real, and companies are going to use it.
They went mask-off when working from home saved money vs return to office. It's about power.
They are the most expensive piece of the workforce by far, especially when you consider their relative measurable productivity
Why parody? Try it.
Luigi had a solution for this too
THE solution.
Edit: just cause I didn't get on that Tesseract cool kids list; I'm saying we should execute CEOs in the street.
I have a fantasy that someone tries using data driven systems to run business. They'd still need AI to do all the C-speak and top-tier sales work, but as it is upper management commonly resents their own workforce and enacts policy just to be vindictive.
Imagine a game company that didn't crunch because it knew crunching only slowed productivity and wrecked the health and morale of the dev team.
Imagine a company who didn't issue RTO mandates because it saw it's telecommuters are more productive and happier working from home.
Imagine if businesses didn't surveillance-max and micromanage their administrative clerks and fulfillment teams understanding that doing so slows them down and makes them miserable.
I don't know for certain that AI-assisted computers can run businesses and manage well, but we have countless examples of how upper management lets their feelings get in the way of maximizing profit and demonstrate incompetence and lack of adult maturity.
The bar really is that low.
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Will the AI CEOs molest AI children on an AI generated private island?
Why does this sound like a Mr Beast video?
The last one to do it wins what? More GPU time?
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This seems over engineered. I’m pretty sure a simple program that just replies “yeah sure” to anyone from the right department asking about something would outperform most CEOs.
The classic..
Middle-manager: We have 3 options, but only enough resources to finish 1, which one should we prioritize?
CEO: These are all great! I look forward to seeing the final version of all 3 next week.
The primary role of the CEO is to solicit cheap lending from banks. A simple program can't do that. You need a real human being at the business with another real human being who was friends with that first human being in college and who now works as a broker at a big financial institution to stamp the loan.
This is every billionaire's path to power. Not via what they know but who they know.
threatens
But the owners of the website have no control over the administration of business infrastructure.
Like, its all very tongue-and-cheek, but it mostly illustrates that our economic model isn't based on "efficiency" or "meritocracy". The folks calling the shots have their positions by way of inheritance, influence peddling, and state-sanctioned violence.
Tongue-in-cheek* otherwise yeah agreed.
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Why does it say "threaten"?
It just offers a service. Googlemail doesn't threaten to provide me with an email address. A gardener doesn't threaten to maintain and tend to your garden.
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Right. Parody.
As a shareholder, I approve of replacing Executives with AI.
Do you want Delamain?
Because that's how you get Delamain.
yes, actually i would prefer that.
It's been tested already.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shell-game/id1753117762
Any 'Too podcast; won't listen' -summary?
Sure
A tech journalist sets up a company of all AI agents. CFO, CTO, HR, Sales, etc. He is following the capabilities advertised by all of the various vendors. He makes significant progress. He demonstrates that is is indeed possible. And some really absurd things happen along the way. Like the vendor advertising that agents are perfectly capable of this hanging up on one of them in disgust.
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I love they had to call out it’s satire
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