AI’s next challenge: Take the CEO’s job

Why big-tech bosses say artificial intelligence is coming for them, too

- Tim Higgins

The message out of Big Tech these days is that even the CEO's job is at risk with the rise of artificial intelligence.

We're accustomed to all of the talk about superintelligent AI vacuuming up office jobs and robots replacing workers on factory floors. But now the corner office appears to be in trouble, too.

“What a CEO does is maybe one of the easier things...for an AI to do,” Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google parent Alphabet, told a reporter recently.

It can feel, at times, that Big Tech is just trying to one-up each other—predicting all of the innumerable ways that AI will remake the world. And it turns out, increasingly, that an AI worker isn’t cool. You know what's cool? An AI CEO is cool.

“Shame on me if Open AI is not the first big company run by an AI CEO,” Sam Altman, Open Al chief executive, said at a conference a few weeks before Pichai’s comments.

Altman was talking about how AI could soon be ready to basically run divisions within companies, if not the companies themselves. The real challenge, Altman concluded, could be the human workforce.

“It may take much longer for society to get really comfortable with this,” Altman said. “But on the actual decision-making—for most things—maybe the AI is pretty good, pretty soon.”

The idea of AI programs one day helping a business run itself has become a mainstream idea in Silicon Valley—if not on Main Street.